Broadcast television engineering related tech topics, rants and outright pontifications.
A writer’s strike, shitty programming and the Internet. Oh my!
Viewer’s are leaving appointment television by the droves and broadcasters are scrambling to do something, anything to keep them firmly planted on the couch during prime time. I’ve covered the topic of declining viewers in the past, but the trend in hemorrhaging viewership of [...]
Sezmi is a startup out of Belmont, California that hopes to win subscribers from cable and satellite providers by providing a cheaper, on-demand and real-time television viewing service for a select selection of the more popular broadcast and “cable” channels.
This new company is born from the ashes and founders of the defunct USDTV service that [...]
This year’s NAB had a bit more energy among television broadcasters than the NAB show last year and almost all of it was around the mobile DTV plans and testing currently going on. Despite the interest in mobile DTV and the NAB claiming ~105,000 registered attendees, the North and Central halls were only mildly [...]
No “film at 11″ drama here; yes, it works and it works surprisingly well for a $60 piece of electronics ($20 after the $40 coupon is applied).
For those that don’t know, this Insignia brand NS-DXA1 DTV converter box is one of a few available devices which are part of the US government’s effort to make [...]
To be succinct, I simply don’t (and won’t) buy as much as I did before. For the past few years I didn’t think too hard about buying the week’s more popular DVD release of the latest blockbuster (or near blockbuster). This is why my DVD collection sprang to over 400 titles! I [...]
For those that don’t know, COMDEX was a computer centric convention that ran in Las Vegas from 1979 to 2003 before lagging attendance from competing conventions and the convergence of consumer electronic devices ultimately made it uninteresting and killed it off.
Back in November of 2007 Avid, currently facing too much competition from Final Cut software [...]
Traditional, over-the-air TV broadcasters are pretty screwed. Time and technology are rapidly shooting past and only now are they collectively looking for ways to recapture a lost audience. Only now are they, as a majority and as part of a coordinated effort, actively promoting the DTV transition, by way of shutting off the [...]
Not many people get inside Sutro Tower, so I consider myself pretty fortunate. My current employer doesn’t have transmit facilities or other interests at Sutro, so I was escorted through the gate and into the facility by a contract engineer, John Buckham, that our SF station has who also maintains a radio station [...]
Today I had a brief reminiscing with some fellow engineers about having to deal with the local news crews at former jobs and told a few tales of the regular stampede of useless, re-hashed content, multiple yet pointless liveshots and how they were more funny than informative.
I believe that local news bloopers are one of [...]
All across the nation there are TV stations headed toward the analog shutdown mandated by congress on February 17th, 2009. At which point, only the station’s high power digital transmitter will be authorized to stay on the air along with the Class ‘A’ and low-power TV stations and their low-power translators (for the moment).
So, [...]