The Digital Man

The BBC are to make selected programs available on the BBC iPlayer - the BBC have done this previously for pilots or one-off shows but in the new move the broadcaster will make forty hours of TV available on the iPlayer and if the move is successful the BBC plan to offer forty hours per week on the iPlayer before regular broadcast. It's another indication that the days of the humble old TV set are numbered. The scheme now means that the BBC iPlayer moves from being a catch up service to something much more exciting.

In fact it can be argued that standard TV is already dead - YouTube channels are being added to the FreeSat service and recently Netflix put all 13 episodes of House of Cards onto its servers for watching in one go or as the viewer chooses - it's the digital equivalent of the DVD box set. TV no longer seems to create movements but rather follows (slowly) in the trail blazed by the internet and the rise in devices capable of receiving all the internet holds, means that many people rarely switch a TV on and consume their media via smart phones, tablets and on laptops and desktops.


I'm embracing the digital world and all the opportunities it offers but at the same time I'm gonna's miss some things. CD's for instance, I still can't get my aged head around downloaded music. Though it's not so much that you only get a digital file that bugs me, but rather than music downloading seems to have killed the album - it's all about single songs these days. The album is an art form that must continue and likely will but the glory days have long gone. DVD's too are heading the way of CD's. Industry predictions are that the DVD's got maybe ten years left to run as a viable ways of obtaining media

It's a different digital world out there - I've seen music go from vinyl, to cassette, to CD and now to MP3, and I've initially felt uneasy about each change before bowing to the inevitable. I never liked cassettes and it took me years to finally realize that vinyl had actually sounded way better than CD. When it became inevitable that MP3s would replace CD's I didn't feel the same emotion as when I realized CD's were killing off vinyl. I didn't have the same love affair with CD's that I'd had with those twelve inch black plastic beasts. Still the facts are that vinyl is, with some exceptions, dead and should be now filed away in C:folders/Fondmemories.doc  along with Spangles, Players NO 6, paperback novels and the Dandy Comic.

These days I read on a Kindle, listen to music on an iPad, take my radio in DABs and watch TV on a computer screen. By day, I am a mild mannered author but by night I walk in gangnam style and when I get those ones and zeros swirling around me,  I become Digital Man- a superhero for our times.