On my way in to the office this morning I was listening to a news programme on the car radio. Two items in particular caught my attention and made me reflect.
First of all, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer has turned 30. For those who are either too young to remember or weren’t interested in this historic piece of kit when it was launched, this was a kid’s (and amateur programmer’s) dream.
For just GB pound 125 you could avail yourself of a ‘high resolution’ (256×192 pixel, 15-colour, eight-bit to you and me) computer with 16 kilobytes of memory. Connecting via an RF cable to a colour TV screen and adding a standard tape recorder made it a fully-functioning, state-of-the-art machine that could either be used for gaming (Jet Set Willy and Manic Miner anyone?) or for more serious programming – perhaps book-keeping or a synthesizer using the Spectrum’s one-channel ‘beeper’.
Is broadband as important as the utilities?
The other piece of news that grabbed my attention is the fact that recent research in the UK has shown we now consider broadband to be as important as our utilities – water or electricity. The presenters commented that they could ‘do without water but not without broadband’. Isn’t it fascinating how much we’ve advanced in 30 years?
This prompted me to look back at the ‘Digital Britain’ paper from 2009, within which was a rather Churchillian statement from then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown: “Only a Digital Britain can unlock the imagination and creativity that will secure for us and our children the highly skilled jobs of the future. Only a Digital Britain will secure the wonders of an information revolution that could transform every part of our lives. Only a Digital Britain will enable us to demonstrate the vision and dynamism that we have to shape the future.”
Fast forward to an article I read earlier this year where OFCOM reported the following:
- Nearly 10 million TV sets were sold in 2010, almost all of which were ‘HD ready’. There were nearly 1 million Internet-enabled TV sales during 2010, and 125,000 sales of TVs were ‘3D capable’
- 76% of homes are now connected to the Internet (against 25% in 2000).
- It took 15 years for half of the UK’s population to purchase a mobile phone and 14 years for them to do the same with multi-channel TV. However, online catch-up TV and social networking websites reached this landmark in just four years.
Riding the digital wave in Britain
We truly are riding the digital wave in Britain… Aren’t we?
Putting this into perspective in terms of the industry I operate in today, these stories and reports prompted me to consider a question from one of my colleagues in the Nordics: “Why is it that the UK is so far behind the rest of the world when it comes to conversion to IP video surveillance?” A fair question given how far we’ve come in such a short period of time, and particularly so given the ready availability of new technology that sees surveillance cameras with hundreds or thousands of times the processing power of the ZX Spectrum I once so coveted as a teenager.
If you’re reading this I’m sure you have your own answers to this question. Could it be price, reliability or the lack of open interfaces?
In recent years this may have been a fair argument but with many of our major CCTV installations moving to IP we seem to have overcome such objections. Instead, I would suggest that many end users are still not aware of what is possible these days as they haven’t experienced this technology for themselves.
So how long will it be before we reach the IP ‘tipping point’ and we look back affectionately at the technology currently being used in the UK and the bewilderment of many countries around the world?
I think of where we are with our modern-day computing that encompasses tablets, smartphones and HD screens and wonder at how far it’s come since the ZX Spectrum?
Progress in technology has been astounding. Perhaps one day we’ll look back at the first IP surveillance camera from 1996 with its three frames every minute and celebrate that in the same way?
Phil Doyle is regional director for northern Europe at Axis Communications (UK)
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