In 1993 I wrote a book titled How To Digitize Video. My employer, The San Francisco Canyon Company, had developed QuickTime for Windows for Apple Computer and was working with Intel on some projects involving an early version of Microsoft's Video for Windows. Back then, desktop video was new and mysterious even for most professional computer programmers. This was before streaming media and just at the start of the first great CD-ROM era. Multimedia shops used top-of-the-line 486 PCs and Mac Quadra 800s for production. Most users made do with even lesser machines. QuickTime and AVI clips were generally 160 120 or 240 180 pixels, 10 15 frames per second. The public (including the film and television industries) remained skeptical.

Ten years later, desktop video is commonly used, well-understood, and finally challenging television on its own turf the living room. TV sets are slowly but surely being replaced by big computer monitors capable of presenting crisp broadcast and VCR content plus anything you can do on a Mac or a PC. Just as important, you can now buy consumer electronics gear that plays PC media natively: MP3 and WMA files on CD-ROM and Windows Media and other video file types on DVD-R in off-the-rack DVD players. This is the true convergence we used to joke about in the mid-90s.