Television on your mobile phone is yet another technological advance that Asia has been able to sample ahead of the Western world.

Until now that is with Virgin unveiling plans to launch the first UK mobile television network, offering several digital network channels such as E4, Sky News and ITV2.

The Guardian reported that people with compatible handsets will have to own a TV licence to qualify for the service. The paper found they also face an estimated network charge of around five to eight pounds per month.

Virgin, now part of cable company NTL meanwhile has been testing the waters with digital mobile television for sometime, as has O2. Vodafone and 3 already offer their customers streamed or downloaded television services, proof they think that a market does exist for mobile television.

How popular this service will actually be in the long term is another issue - the cost has proved to be a disincentive in parts of Asia and mobile reception and battery life have also been barriers. TV is notorious for consuming large amounts of electricity.

Nevertheless mobile television is slowly advancing its way westwards even if there are serious factors that still hinder us from watching our favourite programmes wherever we happen to be.

New life is being breathed into the medium of photography. The technique of combining still images with sound helps to ensure photojournalism is at the heart of a growing digital phenomena - the multimedia slide show.

These allow photographers to present their photos in such a way that they deliver compelling storytelling: powerful images combined with narration from the people who lived and breathed the events depicted.

Magnum in motion features a series of photo essays from world renown photographers such as Burt Glinn and Steve McCurry with audio narratives of the photographers’ experiences and thoughts.

Apple’s Final Cut Pro was used to edit and combine sound with photographs which can be downloaded as video podcasts. This type of accessibility provides a new audience with an introduction to photojournalism. It also brings a new dimension to feature stories.

This series by Magnum covers a whole spectrum of topics from different cultures through to events in history allowing a variety of viewpoints to be heard.

Photojournalist Martin Fuchs calls it “interactive storytelling”, an additional way to showcase work, and to provide a better understanding of the story he is trying to tell, by providing context.

Many newspapers and magazines such as The New York Times and the Washington Post are creating multimedia slide shows on their websites by presenting the news in this format.

Mediastorm is a multimedia production studio that is passionate about “visual storytelling” and creates media that focuses upon just that. Like Magnum, mediastorm have a series of photo essays with commentary but from the subjects themselves rather than just the photographers.

With this type of personal commentary, it allows the viewer to understand more about the stories as the subject is directly leading them through their lives, shot by shot.

Onedotzero is an international film festival celebrating the use of digital technology in film on a global scale. In light of their tenth annniversary, is digital a long overdue innovation?

In an age where the whirring of video can still faintly be heard has the march of digital film progressed at too slow a pace? Onedotzero has long been promoting the use of digital for over ten years, but how does digital film benefit the film industry?

The conversion of film to digital has long been changing the way we use technology. Spanning more than ten years, onedotzero has celebrated and promoted the merging and the use of digital technology and film together by commissioning the creation of new media projects and screening them across the globe.

Onedotzero’s digital film festival is an international affair, with events being organised in numerous locations including Argentina, Croatia and Korea.

It aims to manage and promote projects that encompass a broad range of digital media including short films, interactive media and installations. With onedotzero pioneering the way forward for use of digital film and the creation of projects that use and promote digital media, why has it taken so long to catch on to the digital era?

Digital film is the new sleeker and upgraded version of all the now seemingly slower technologies, its advantages being that it can be copied continuously without any degradation of the original quality of the material and has a significantly lower cost than 35mm film.

It can also be edited on affordable hardware and software such as Apple’s Final Cut Pro, which allows the film editors to edit sound and image on a desktop computer, making digital videos more easy and accessible to everyone and as a result, digital video is overlapping into television, mobile phones and video conferencing.

The BBC reported that YouTube, a site where users contribute and share their videos, claimed that its videos account for 60% of all videos watched online in the US. The popularity of YouTube is huge indicator that the onslaught of digital media is not just a passing phase but a revolution of change in the way we use, interact and share information in our daily lives.

The use of digital film is faster, more efficient and of higher quality and its benefits are abundant.