High Definition (HD) video is taking its place in our TV broadcasts, and soon our DVD formats. Standard Definition will still be around for plenty of time due to our love for watching historical and archived material (and networks that save money running repeats).

But until Internet bandwidth demands catch up to the requirements of high quality video, we’ll have to get used to Low Definition video. Interestingly, most web video these days is equal or better quality to the VCDs we produced in yesteryear when it was too impossible to produce our own DVDs.

HD 1920×1080, 1280×720
SD 768×576, 720×480
LD 320×240

If we’re going to give consumers the choice of format, device, delivery, and medium, then it will soon (if not already) be apparent that we can’t cater for everyone. If I was to download music from BigPond Music and play it on my iPod through my car stereo, my requirements are very different from someone who wants to listen to a podcast embedded into a weblog without downloading any files.

This is particularly so with video now. You can’t support iPod, PSP, Windows Mobile, embedded web video (e.g. Flash), and HD/SD download, all with high and low bandwidth and all via HTTP, FTP, P2P, etc… What’s more, if you want to apply licensing restrictions to content in all these formats you might as well give up right away.

Basically, we need to change the way we consider distributing video, just as consumers have to change the way they receive video and other web media. We need to distribute one file format, perhaps with varying quality based on bandwidth preferences (it would be great if this could be done at a server level, drawing from one source file), and either require that users employ software to convert the file to their desired format, or again, use server-side technology to transcode it in real-time and deliver it to the user.

So perhaps rather than a “standard video format” that we all seem to be fighting to determine, we should be looking for a protocol for real-time delivery of ANY format.