Chapter 7: Application Outlook 305 Previously, video material was usually too large to be carried over typical modem connections. There were exceptions, such as stamp- size news broadcasts, or fi lm trailers that were cleverly compressed and hand-optimized. Since then, network bandwidths have increased by a few orders of magnitude. It is sometimes said that DSL speeds of 1 Mbit/s or more allow the average person to concentrate on the video content and not on the limitations of the network. Such speeds, and better, are now available to major populations of PC users globally. While not yet the norm in mobile networks today, HSUPA and similar standards will bring equivalent speeds to handsets. 22 Video coding has also improved. Earlier standards, such as MPEG- 1 and MPEG-2, have since been surpassed in effi ciency by DivX (and Xvid), H.264, and others. The improvements have made it possible to fi t a full-length movie of two hours or so into 1 GB of memory, with quality that the average consumer considers satisfactory. This amounts to roughly 1 MBit/s (with audio), which can already be streamed in real time over the Internet, or allocated to downloading a fi lm in a few hours. The fi rst sites to pioneer large-scale video distribution were dealing with adult material. For those audiences, poor viewing quality was often acceptable. P2P fi le sharing sites were fi rst fl ooded with MP3 music and pirated software, but today video material is abundant. The most popular downloads in Pirate Bay, an illegal fi le sharing site, include mostly video material: fi lms, TV shows, adult content, and a wealth of recent software and music releases. For a long time, it has been possible to digitize video content with the various video capture devices available for PCs. However, the users of those devices have had to put extra effort into converting their analogue footage to digital fi les. This extra step has hindered larger audiences from sharing their videos. In contrast, however, many current devices store their video content in digital formats that can be readily manipulated. Digital TV receivers, hard disk TV recorders, digital cameras, solid state video cameras, and mobile phones all produce digital fi les that are ready to be sent (albeit sometimes with extra com- pression) over networks. This immediacy is, we feel, a major factor behind the surge of video content. 22 In fact, so much better and tighter, that audio seems to consume more than half of some movies circulating in P2P networks. It seems that many people are prepared to cut down on video quality to keep the size down, but prefer to keep the surround sound experience (almost) intact. This will (again) change, as new surround sound compression methods are now emerging.