Digital video, which has many formats, is a highly beneficial tool. Businesses can tap into its neglected power for Internet marketing (the process of promoting, selling, and distributing a product or service 24/7 on the Internet). There is no better way to sell in a global market that makes purchases 24 hours a day than with a well designed website that includes this beneficial tool. It is also involved in many litigation cases and is quickly finding its way into court rooms around the world.

In the following paragraphs, my goal is to help you understand digital video with regard to closed circuit television systems and its many formats.

In its simplest terms, digital video can be defined as a video that has been recorded using a software program and digitally stored in a computer. A CCTV system is a computer. That digitized information can be controlled from a computer and displayed directly on a computer monitor.

All current digital video file formats, which are listed below, are based on PCM or Pulse-code modulation. PCM is a digital representation of an analog signal where the magnitude of the signal is sampled regularly at uniform intervals, then quantized to a series of symbols in a numeric form (usually based on binary code).

Here is a brief catalog of digital video file types so you better understand how it is used.

CCIR 601 (or RE 601) is a file used for broadcast television stations because of the analogue and digital television conversion. This digital video file format converts and encodes interlaced analogue video signals into digital video.

In the old days, television commercials were first distributed on analogue first, then digital tape. Today, TV commercials can be distributed over wireless networks electronically using digital video technology.

Services like SpotMixer allow businesses to create their own commercials on line and distribute them over a plethora of media, including television and the internet.

MPEG-4 is good for online distribution of large videos and video recorded to flash memory. This is a digital format used for video iPods and uploading to YouTube and other social media networks, but keep reading.

MPEG-2 (used for DVDs) is a digital file format used to make DVDs. An MPEG-2 digital video file burned onto a DVD will play video on a DVD player and computer provided the computer has the ability to play DVDs. Some computers with older DVD technology will have difficulty reading DVDs that have been burned with newer technology.

MPEG-1 is used for video CDs and was the first digital video format that was mass marketed. It is rarely used today but occasionally pops up. Many DVD players will play MPEG-1, but not all can read this digital file format.

H.261 was the first truly practical digital video coding standard. In fact, all subsequent international encoding like MPEG-1, H.262, MPEG-2, H.263, MPEG-4, and H.264 (MPEG-4 Part 10) have been based closely on the H.261 design, which is now seldom used.

H.263 is a video codec standard originally designed as a low-bit rate compressed format for videoconferencing. H.263 has since found many applications on the internet: much Flash Video content (as used on sites such as YouTube, Google Video, MySpace, etc.) is encoded in this format.

The original version of Real Video (which