Another innovative technology using video, but which is even farther down the road, is the integration of image information with computer systems—the capability to turn your PC screen into a TV screen. It works like this: An attorney wants to review an event in a case. He or she dials into the court’s computer and the docket of the case appears. The attorney then scrolls down to a particular court proceeding and touches a function key for “video transcript.” The PC then becomes a TV set on which the attorney can watch the selected proceeding.
a thing that comes up a lot when reading past predictions of the future is that almost everything that was predicted came to pass, and in most cases has become daily life for many people, yet ultimately appears to be a whimsical fantasy in retrospect because it didn't become ubiquitous, either because it's really hard to scale, or because nobody actually wants it.
did we get flying cars? absolutely, they're called helicopters. there are people who commute that way, just not most people. did we get wristwatch videophones? absolutely, it just turned out that's not as obvious an upgrade to the telephone as it seemed. and so on.
the quoted prediction, from ABA Journal 1991, did come to pass. I can get you links to video recordings of many thousands of legal proceedings, from hearings to full trials. but the fantasy implied that all proceedings, everywhere would be made available like this, and that... did not happen.
it turns out that video is very hard to capture, store and distribute. how do you shoot a trial or a hearing? the moment you have two people facing each other, it becomes staggeringly hard to capture them both on camera. what if you have three people? a round table? should you shoot multiple angles? how many? who's going to set up the cameras? you're going to have a technician at every single legal proceeding, forever, everywhere, babying them at all times, making sure they're aimed, zoomed and focused? (spoiler: we found out later that businesspeople are extremely bad at operating video equipment.)
video is also extremely unpleasant to skim. no lawyer wants to watch 400 hours of a trial, complete with coughs and ums and long pauses while waiting for witnesses to be summoned and sworn in. and there's no way to summarize it - no automated process exists, and even a manual process can't tailor the result to only the info you're interested in at the moment. reality just takes a very long time to happen; the actual amount of time it takes to digest an hour of video footage is... one hour.
the beauty of text transcripts is that, for some reason, our language centers are extremely good at zooming through printed text looking for keywords. in fact, i came across one court's video transcript system that had implemented an OCR mechanism that indexed the entire video word by word, so you could ctrl+F the transcript, then click anywhere to jump to that moment in the video - and it was STILL split up into chapters by a human hand.
after that, you still have to store all of this, keep it backed up to probably-absurd govt. IT standards, make it all available at all times of day, and maintain a private video playback system.
and after all of that - do lawyers even need to hear and see proceedings all that often? are the picture and sound actually that much more useful than the plain text transcript? probably not, usually.
this particular fantasy failed to happen for both of the major reasons: it's a logistical nightmare, and it's ultimately not very desirable. and what i find interesting is that all of that was easily knowable in 1991, when this prediction was made. we knew how fast storage was growing and how much space video took up, we knew how slow network connections were - a single MPEG stream would knock out a full tenth of an entire office network's throughput, ffs. so it was pretty easy to look at this and go "hmm, well, no, that's really never going to be universal."
likewise, it was obvious that flying cars would be fail-deadly and far too difficult for the average person to pilot safely in the mid 20th century, and that wrist videophones would be incredibly awkward to operate for many reasons. post ends, no moral
