There's one thing that you can count on technology for: over time, prices come down and performance goes up. As a result, what was once only available to professionals and governments eventually makes its way into the hands of average consumers. Nowhere has this trend been more obvious than in photography and music production. The accessibility of digital cameras and Photoshop have impacted the professional photography industry in a way that few in the profession saw coming. The same holds true for audio production, with bands foregoing expensive studio time in favour of using software like Logic Pro and modest home-studios. Now it's time for video, the last bastion of high-end AV, to come down from the pro-heavens and be let loose upon the masses. And the signs are already clear: video artists are going HD.

If you think that YouTube, Joost, Veoh, etc. are going to be hosting grainy home videos of babies dancing and teenagers ranting forever... they probably will. But in addition, they will be hosting beautiful footage of life on earth, be it as hyper-real documentation, esoteric abstraction, or avant-garde surrealism. As tools become affordable, and artists become more adept with the software, an explosion of video art is around the corner. Trend-setting galleries in all major art centres have begun to focus in on the blossoming video art movement. After cutting their teeth on DV, many of these artists are only now gearing up for the High Def experience (it's still expensive, just not exhorbitant as it was a couple years ago). The surrogate mother of creative content distribution, Apple, has already as much as said that the iTunes Store, which supports their AppleTV device, will eventually sell HD content. Once that happens, and they open up to video artists the way they have to musicians, there could be a booming online HD Video marketplace. Let's just hope that all these up-and-coming HDV artists learn the value of proper tagging so we can find their masterpieces when the time comes.