Video’s intrinsic medium-fluidity renders it the material support for immediacy

Evidence

From the Latin “to see,” “video” connotes a wildly wide variety of material and technical functions, elastically expanding over time. Its essential image-capture can be analog or digital, a magnetic tape of camera signals or an electronic compression of waves, at speeds that distinguish it from film (if something like 16 frames per second are required to simulate motion, film generally works at 24, while video can be as fast as 120), and in aspect ratios that are horizontal (as in film, TV, and computer screens) or vertical (as for phones). Image data can be relayed via radio wave or through coaxial cables or over digital networks. In the industry for producing televisual culture, video can mean television as opposed to radio and film, or taping as opposed to TV broadcast, or digital as opposed to celluloid, or digital moving image media subsuming both television and film, recording and transmission and playback. Visual transmission technology is thus a type of media whose medium is very fluid, rendering the material support for immediacy as flow. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 197

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes what video literally is — the fluid-medium medium whose technological heterogeneity supports immediacy-as-flow, key to grounding her later claims.
• QUESTION: The frame-rate, aspect-ratio, and relay specifics would bear verifying as technical facts.