Bob Doyle, the first director, and Jeff Sauer, the second director of NewMedia Lab, wrote many articles for NewMedia Magazine on DV camcorders, non-linear editing systems, video hard drives, multimedia projectors, and dynamic web publishing systems.
Bob and Jeff developed a diagnostic test tape to evaluate the performance of video capture cards that converted analog video to digital. They tested 18 PC capture cards and Bob wrote the 14-page article Windows Video Capture Cards with the help of several DTV Group members. Bob and Jeff prepared the feature table and supervised testing by Mike Bergman, Ted Carroll, Leo Cierpial, Peter Pinch, Will Martins, Peter Stassa and other Desktop Video Group members. Bob and his son Derek Doyle converted the NewMedia Lab article into a NewMedia Lab/DTV Group CD-ROM with the results of the capture tests, a comparison of various compression codecs, and a tutorial on digital video. In 1995 came the introduction of the MiniDV digital video format and Apple's FireWire for noise-free transfer to a desktop video editor. Analog camcorders were obsolete, capture cards no longer necessary, and all the compression schemes were replaced by the MPEG-2 based DV format. The DTV Group helped Bob do a roundup of 13 DV camcorders from the $23,000 Sony DSR-130 to the tiniest JVC GR-DV1. It marked the end of analog camcorders for professional work. The study produced an 11-page article for NewMedia entitled "Shooting Stars: A Digital Video Revolution". The Desktop Video Group helped do the testing for other cover stories like "Hard Drives for Digital Video" in 1995 and "Real-Time Video Editing" in 1996. "Desktop Video" was the main theme of a whole issue of NewMedia magazine that was distributed widely at the 1998 National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show. In 1997, Mike Jittlov, the acclaimed stop-action animator of The Wizard of Speed and Time was in residence at Desktop Video Group studying digital video editing and animation tools. DTV Group arranged and videotaped Jittlov presentations of his films at Northeastern, MIT, and Harvard for Jittlov's hundreds of fans in the Boston area. In 1998, DTV Group member Matt McMakin experimented with digital video webcasting and assisted Harvard University Extension School to post the University's first distance-learning class on the web. Also in 1998, Steven Ascher and his wife Jeanne Jordan studied non-linear digital video editing at DTV Group as Steve was producing the 1999 edition of his classic Filmmaker's Handbook. DTV Group provided technical, logistic, and financial support to many individuals and media groups in the Boston area, including the Boston Cyberarts Festival, Boston Film/Video Foundation, Cambridge Community Television, Quad Sound Studios, Harvard Radcliffe Television, and Massachusetts College of Art. As multimedia and CD-ROM production declined toward the end of the 'nineties, Bob's attention turned to the world-wide-web. He wrote cover stories for NewMedia on "Web Servers" and "Serving Dynamic Pages." These were co-authored with DTV Group members Sam Murphy and Derek Doyle. The interests of many Desktop Video Group members turned to web video. Bob and Derek Doyle turned their attention to community collaboration tools as they founded skyBuilders.com. Their vision is an online "community computer" or CC - the next step beyond the personal computer or PC - which can hold the complete "institutional memory" of an organization, including all its digital video, audio, and animation files. In 2003, DTV Group collaborated with Professor Charlie Nesson of the Berkman Center to send video production tools to Jamaica. skyBuilders also sent web servers with their "timeLines" information management software. DTV Group member David Pearson, executive director of Shawmut Education carried the computers and MiniDV video production gear to Jamaica. While there he met with the Ministers of Education and Technology and he trained dozens of Jamaicans. The Harvard Law School Berkman Center for Internet and Society subsequently held a day-long conference on economic development, with one hour devoted to Jamaica. Bob Doyle, David Pearson, and Jamaican filmmaker Barbara Blake-Hannah collaborated on a 25-minute film on Digital Music and Web Publishing in Jamaica describing the Harvard work in Jamaica. It is available on YouTube. In 2003, DTV Group recorded the OSCOM and Bloggercon conferences at the Harvard Law School Berkman Center for Internet and Society and published them as web video.