Over the past 100 years, the means of production and distribution of television and movies have been firmly in the hands of a few very large and well-funded production studios and broadcast companies.
In most countries, video content production and distribution have also, until recently, largely been overseen –if not outright controlled – by an army of censors and reams of regulations and standards.
But with the explosion of online video in recent years, made possible by miniature HD video cameras embedded in handheld, mobile smartphones; flash drives and cloud-based storage capable of housing gigabytes of raw video files; and ultra-fast WiFi and 4G signals, the power of video storytelling has quickly moved into the hands of anyone old enough to hold a video camera or smartphone (and aim it in the right direction).
