What finer word in the English vernacular than “vacation?” It’s a wonderful way to keep one’s head from exploding, but a temporary break from the news race these days is like spending a few decades in cryogenic sleep.
A group of scientists and engineers this week released a draft glossary for 3DTV that starkly illustrates its own necessity. Never before has TV had so much power to make people sick...
The late senator likened the Internet to a series of tubes that occasionally gets clogged. He was summarily flamed on the Internet... The good senator was valiantly trying to encapsulate his perception in simple terms, which flies in the face of coders, hackers, trolls and all of those who don’t wish to be eviscerated by this typically anonymous hoard.
There are
1,024 counties or “county equivalents” lacking broadband, according to the
FCC’s Sixth Broadband Deployment Report. They comprise 24 million people in 8.9
million households that are generally poorer and more rural than the national
average. The same areas very likely were outliers as the nation adopted
electricity. Lights are on in Custer County, Nebraska tonight because of the
Rural Electrification Act.
Free broadcast TV service is facing displacement
by rhetoric, as characterized by three words--“looming spectrum crisis.” Unfortunately,
most parroted of the assertions about radio frequency spectrum are as clear as
Gulf stream waters, and based on wobbly science at best.
The questionable efficacy of media ownership rules is why
they get batted around in court like a ball of yarn at a cat festival. That,
and media corporations can afford all the lawyers in the known solar system,
while the FCC pays scale.
Under the leadership of a former FCC chairman,
Kevin Martin, expletives in “Saving Private Ryan” were found acceptable on the
basis of “artistic necessity,” while the same ones were censured in a PBS
documentary on the blues. Aside from racist implications in the determination,
it was legally random. A law defining indecency can’t rest on subjective
analysis.
The follow-up coverage on “Today” pegged out the
silly meter with NBC-logoed screen-grabs of Lohan’s tweets. Twitter, after all,
is a hotbed of Mensans. Then the feature piece: “Lindsay in Lock Up: What Will
Jail Time Be Like for Lohan?” It launched with an interview of a felonious
stock broker who now “counsels people on how to survive jail time” because
South Africa already has a president.
The broadcast television industry was shouted down this
week. By the First Web Surfer himself. The presidential memo cheat sheet,
issued by the National Economic Counsel, contains a bit of edifying verbiage
within a paragraph calling for an inventory of current spectrum users: ...this inventory is not necessary to enable the repurposing of large swaths of spectrum.”
Americans may finally get to hear the Voice of
America over the air for the first time since the network started 68 years ago.
As it is, a majority of Americans have no exposure to the media operations
costing them around $750 million a year. Meanwhile, cable platforms stateside
carry Al Jazeera, and DirecTV carries MHz Networks, home of several
international newscasts.
It would be the height of cynicism to assert the
Genachowski FCC has become a propaganda machine for the wireless industry. Only
the most jaded conspiracy theorist could imagine that a Web entrepreneur temporarily
appointed as a government regulator would have a self-serving agenda.
The FCC has come up with a middle way for
regulating broadband. The stuff on the Internet would remain a Title I
information service. The network that carries the stuff would be regulated as a
Title II telecommunications service. This would give the commission more legal
leverage to enforce network neutrality. It could tell Comcast to stop throttling
bandwidth hogs, and make it stick.
TVs are evolving faster than bugs
these days.
There are nearly as many varieties. There are liquid crystal,
digital-light
processing, organic and inorganic light-emitting diode displays, plasmas
and
laser TVs. We’ve not yet even started on Internet-connected or 3D TVs, and perhaps
we
shouldn’t until we achieve uniform quality in HDTV.
The focus of the government’s
broadband strategy
is now on the cable industry, giving broadcasters a chance to regroup
for the
continuing spectrum onslaught.
There was a bit of a flap in the Los Angeles broadcast news community this week culminating with an executive exit. It seems this executive oversaw a purported news segment depicting a “Real Housewife of Orange County” as a KNBC
Anyone who’s ever been a news editor at high
school newspaper, a grain elevator journal or a national TV network knows the
third certainty. After death and taxes, it’s feast or famine. There is either
so much going on it’s virtually impossible to cover it... or not. And so it was
that a handful of Midwestern TV stations booked a guy purporting to be a yo-yo
champion.
The Internet Age is one of instant reactivity. There’s no need for patience any longer no need for deliberation. Now we can do things like crash the market with a keystroke and then watch it happen in real time. It
Google’s foray into TV will radically alter the
market and possibly, the medium. It will finally commercialize set-top boxes,
propel Blu-ray penetration and reaffirm that television remains the most
effective platform for advertising.
People who appeared on TV shows
really were stars. There were three networks.
If you appeared on TV, everyone saw you. Now there are 300 networks and
people
appear on TV because they are from New Jersey, are a housewife, have a
litter
of kids or they are fat.
The NAB Show is so big and busy,
it’s easy to
miss one of its most distinct characteristics--the schism. It’s as if
the
Hilton and the convention center floor are two different nations,
Politics and Technology.
These two areas are as disparate as any can get.