The Meaning of Media
We hear the words “medium” and “media” often, largely because they can mean almost anything. We’re all struggling for vocabulary to describe a world that is changing faster than our language! A “medium” is something that transmits information between two elements which otherwise could not communicate. We hear music through the “medium” of radio, see news and entertainment through the “medium” of television. We refer to journalists, newspapers, radio and TV as “the Media” because they transmit information about the parts of world we could not access ourselves. We call the Internet and everything related to it “new media” because it fulfills a similar function in a new way. The “media” in “digital media” signifies text, sound, or images -- anything that transmits an experience to your brain.

What is Digital?
“Digital” means “in a format that computers can understand.” Taking that one step further, “digital” describes anything that can be communicated from one computer to another. Hence, “digital media” are text, images and sound that have been converted into digital format and can be moved around a computer network, whether that network is a couple of home computers, an office LAN (Local Area Network), or the Internet.

What About “Interactive”?
This is another word that has come to have very broad meaning. “Interactive” simply means anything that involves TWO WAY communication. When you read a newspaper, the information flows in only one direction: from the newsprint into your brain. But an online publication or website not only gives you information, but can accept information FROM you; therefore it is “interactive.” As websites become more sophisticated, many people now use the word “interactive” to describe websites that are particularly advanced and allow each user to have a unique experience of the information it contains.

Acronyms
Technical information often uses acronyms, capital-letter abbreviations that use the first letter of each word. One important acronym to know is “IP,” or Internet Protocol. IP is like the address you write on a letter and the postal system that understands that address and gets your letter to the person you want it to reach. IP helps files move around on the Internet, which is really just a huge, global computer network. IP is also the way files move around most smaller computer networks, which usually need to talk to the Internet. (For more about networks, IP, and transferring digital media, click here.) “Digital media” is often called “media over IP” or “video over IP,” etc. “Over IP” is just a ‘techie’ way of describing files sent via computer network instead of by other, often more traditional methods, like broadcasting over the airwaves, or using cable. (IP can also stand for “intellectual property,” which is a complex topic unrelated to Internet Protocol – one we’ll discuss later!)

Other common acronyms in the digital media realm are iTV (interactive television), STB (set top box that sits on your TV and brings content to it, like the one you might have for cable TV), IP-STB (a set top box that carries DIGITAL MEDIA over Internet Protocol - IP), PVR (personal video recorder – like Tivo), VoD (video on demand), MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group, which is actually a format for digital video), MP3 (MPEG audio layer 3 – a format for digital sound), and VGA (video graphics array – basically, a computer monitor as opposed to a television set).

For more acronyms, details and definitions on digital media, click here.
To see our digital media products, click here.
To go to a list of links about digital media, click here.