A long time ago, equipment lasted longer than it does today. A TV purchased (in, say, California) in the late 50s might still have been receiving colour images until June 12, 2009. A black-and-white TV of the early 1940s could, given sufficient replacement vacuum tubes to turn it into the axe of anyone’s father, have been making viewable (if monochromatic) pictures for nearly seventy years, and even bigger numbers emerge in places where standards evolve more slowly.

One interpretation of this is that everyone who bought an early NTSC TV got an absolutely amazing deal, especially at a time when “TV” meant a piece of French-polished mahogany furniture which was mostly a drinks cabinet, but which also boasted a small, deeply curved CRT sticking out of one side.

The other interpretation is that any society in which technology enjoys a multi-decade lifespan is backward and luddite and suffers a truly glacial pace of advancement. After all, imagine what would happen if cellphone manufacturers could only release a new model once every three quarters of a century, and what an unconscionably terrible bane on society that would be.

Blessed by the ministers of SMPTE

There was a time when a blessing by the ministers of the SMPTE, ITC and EBU mattered. Back when the Marconi company was a regular NAB exhibitor, in the 70s and early 80s, broadcasters would routinely require that a certain minimum number of manufacturers commit to, say, a tape format, before it was adopted. While technology has always prompted standardisation to some degree, that sort of broad uptake would not generally happen until the behaviour of that tape format had been precisely defined.

In 2023, that sort of approach is more likely to be seen as a laughably backward impediment to progress, which is why Zoom, Skype, FaceTime, WhatsApp, Teams, Google Meet and a dozen others are not interoperable. It’s not as if the traditional organs of standardisation haven’t tried to address fast-moving subjects like computer video formats: in 2008, the SMPTE ratified its standard VC-3 in hopes of providing a mezzanine codec for file-based camera equipment and post-production workstations.

It would make a lot of sense understand if VC-3 was a standardisation of ProRes, but it isn’t: it’s a standardisation of Avid’s DNxHD, the competitor. ProRes became the more popular option simply because it was implemented in a product which which gained a lot of popularity at all levels around the time of release. Still, it shows the standards people aren’t asleep: there is a standard for mezzanine codecs which has proper paperwork and uses at least a certain amount of openness in its design. It’s just not the option most people actually use, which sort of defeats the object.

In reality, ProRes actually is fairly well standardised, being controlled by a company which tolerates no deviation in pursuit of a philosophy of low-hassle computing. In general, though, it’s not unreasonable to look on developments of the last decade or three as simply having outpaced the ability of the standards bodies to keep turning out paperwork. Writing a standard is an exacting, difficult, longwinded technical task, even before we take into account the fact that standardisation works, in some sense, against the desire of salespeople to have something unique to sell.

The outcome

The outcome is inevitable: we exist in a world where every new generation of camera requires a new generation of flash cards and a new update to Resolve.

Movement in the other direction comes from organisations like the L Mount Alliance, which seeks to standardise the eponymous mount, seem to push against the tide. At some point, even the hardest-nosed capitalist recognises the value of an ecosystem in which enhanced compatibility adds a lot of value. The L mount is a standard and that is good – but that’s an industrial initiative, and hasn’t been through one of the traditional standardisation bodies.

Sometimes, it’s hard to complain when people decline to push for a standard to be written. Standards bodies have sometimes seemed desperately sluggish. Development of high-end, uncompressed video over IP for broadcast production was dogged by technological puritanism to the point where the easier, more available NDI has preempted it in at least some ways.

And to some degree, none of this is anything new. There’s a piece of wording at the beginning of EIA RS-170, one of the earliest defining standards for American television, from the 1950s, which states that nothing in the standard prevents anyone building anything that’s not to the standard, so long as it’s adequately labelled as such. The difference is the sheer speed with which things are now moving, and the ability of conference rooms full of chin-stroking engineers to keep up as we approach what’s increasingly looking like a technological singularity.