The handicam was invented in 1985.

It was a compact innovation... exactly the same size of Japanese passport at that time. It was amazing for the customers, Shoji Nemoto, the SONY handicam inventor told SIB crew in Tokyo.

Intended originally for entertainment purposes only, it didn't take long to find new uses for this revolutionary technology.

The Handicam Revolution began when a video camera captured police beating Rodney King on a Los Angeles highway. The shocking amateur footage was broadcast on tv around the world.

The acquittal of the police officers after their first trial sparked outrage, and riots erupted in a 20 block section of Los Angeles leaving 54 people dead and over 2,000 injured.

Ever since Rodney King, broadcasters have been relying on amateur video to provide images of events that their own camera people haven't captured. And human rights activists are relying on the power of video images to capture the attention of the broadcasters.

In Mexico, Eric Rosenthal takes his camera inside psychiatric institutions to investigate the conditions people are forced to live in. He is the director of MDRI - Mental Disability Rights International. Besides Mexico, he's been inside facilities in Uruguay, and all across the former Soviet Union. When ABC saw his footage, they did their own investigation for 20/20. As a result of these investigations, Mexico shut down one of the most abusive institutions and pledged to overhaul its system of caring for people with mental disabilities.

In the Congo, five years of war has claimed over three million lives. Yet the conflict remains one of the most under-reported stories of our times. When David McAllister of the aid organization Christian Blind Mission first tried calling major news agencies to warn about the escalating intertribal violence, no journalist was interested in the story. But when he called a press conference to release his own gruesome amateur footage, all major broadcasters showed up.

McCallister describes the difference their footage made: We were saying the whole time, look there is a disaster here in the Congo that is unfolding, but we found it very difficult to get the attention of the world press. We were able to get this on video, horrific video, and once they saw the macabre sights of women and babies slashed open with machete, this is what galvanized action. I know that Mr. [Nelson] Mandela was contacted, he telephoned Mr. Kofi Anan [head of the United Nations], it went to the very highest levels...so it did have an impact.

Like the field workers in the Congo, Milaim Bellanica in Kosovo braved treacherous conditions to document atrocities committed in his community and get the images out to the press. He was a wedding videographer who hid in his cellar while Serbian forces massacred his neighbours outside. After the murderers left, he emerged with his camera and filmed the gruesome aftermath. Once he was safely across the border at a refugee camp, he went looking for BBC reporter George Alagiah so that he could show it to the world.

George Alagiah remembers: There were probably hundreds of us journalists, TV crews and print journalists and so on, on the border between Albania and Kosovo. And of course, we were reporting, or trying to report what was happening in Kosovo, but none of us had been into Kosovo. It was impossible to tell. It was as if this mountain range...was a curtain beyond which we couldn't see. And then, suddenly, I get a message saying, there's a guy who has come across the border, who wants to talk to you, if you are the guy from the BBC, and he's got some film. [Milaim] had the presence of mind and the equipment to be able to surreptitiously film this whole thing, then get the tape and bring it out. I think it had an enormous impact.

Now a BBC-4 presenter, George cautions that This (amateur) stuff has its place in those areas where we can't get to, to get the first hand report but I don't think it should ever be an excuse for saying, "Well, we don't need our own first hand reports because we'll just wait for this amateur stuff to come in."

Ondrej Cakl risks his life monitoring the neo-Nazi movement in the Czech Republic. For over 10 years, Cakl and his anti-racist group have filmed skin activities. His team of underground videographers has filmed skinheads harassing and assaulting people on the streets of Prague. Cakl's video material is often broadcast on national news, and has helped convict neo-nazis of racially motivated crimes in the nation's courtrooms.

Because people watch so much TV, they're used to seeing pictures of everything. To explain to the police, "That guy over there did such and such" here in the Czech republic is very difficult. It really bothers me actually that people need so many pictures. If people don't have visuals they are not satisfied. says Cakl.

Greenpeace was one of the first activist groups to fully integrate media into their political strategies. Their media arsenal has now expanded to include custom-designed kite cams to fly over prohibited pollution sites, scuba diving media units to expose underwater toxic dumping, and tiny 'helmet cams' that allow climbers to broadcast their images from hard-to-reach locations.

Martin Atkin, Greenpeace video producer, describes their commitment to innovative uses of communications technology: We spend a lot of time looking at new ways of delivering our pictures to news agencies and broadcasters, because the easier we make it for them, the more likely they are to use our pictures. For people who don't necessarily have the same resources we do, that can be a problem because they can't afford to send camera crews everywhere they go which are likely to grab the attention of the news decision makers. And so a lot of their work is getting forgotten or ignored, simply because the images don't exist.