Thursday, February 22, 2007
Less broad, more cast
Hanging with Craig Rosa of KQED's Quest (tag: kqedquest). He is showing me how much advanced and clueful stuff they're doing around this show. I love learning from people who are way ahead of my curve.
See hear
Dave and I will be on stage from 4-5pm EST here at the IMA convention. There are live video and audio streams.
[Later...] Lisa Williams blogged the talk live. Under poor connectivity circumstances, too. Here's the text file.
Moving on
Did you know that all your channel-branded TV stations — WCBS/2 in New York, KPIX/5 in San Francisco and every other "Channel (fill in a number)" that has been around since the 1940s — are going to be marched off those channels and onto new ones in 2009? And that your TV will no longer get anything at any of the over-the-air channels those stations occupy today? WCBS will be on channel 56. KPIX will be on channel 29. Every station, somewhere else.
If you don't know that, you're in the majority, according to a survey in a trade paper I just read (but can't find at the moment) here at the IMA show.
Fact is, every TV station has to move to a new channel to transmit an all-digital signal. They can't do that on the channels they occupy now. Even the UHF stations have to move, even though all stations will be collected on the UHF band, abandoning the old VHF band. Channels 2 to 13 will be auctioned off for other purposes. And analog TV will be no more. The original target year for that transition was 2006. It got moved back to 2009. I think it really will happen at that point.
Not sure where else to go with that, other than where I've gone before. But it's still an interesting fact.
[Later...] I was talking about this stuff with Ken Devine of WNET/13 last night, and he told me that in a few cases — including WNET's — stations will transmit temporarily to UHF channels, and eventually move back to their original VHF channels. This is happening in regions such as the Northeast, where there are too many stations to cram into the available UHF space. In these areas, the VHF spectrum used for DTV (Digital TV) will not be auctioned off.
Here are all the licenses and construction permits for TV stations in the New York City area. The channels ending in "DT" are the digital ones.
The Daily Santa Barbarians
I continue to be amazed at how thoroughly Craig Smith covers the surreal ongoing story of the News Press disaster. His latest is The "Angel of Death" Shows up in Goleta. By the way, you'll find far more about Santa Barbara from the pile of links to the right than you will at the paper or its site.
Say everywhere
I just said something, as an audience participant, on World Have Your Say, a BBC radio show with a million listeners around the world, broadcasting live from the IMA conference here in Boston.
I came into this room where a guy was walking around the front doing talk-show stuff, passing a mike around the audience to answer questions also being answered by listeners in Cairo and elsewhere. At one point he asked if any bloggers actually felt they had influence. I raised my hand, a woman stuck a mike in my face, and I said something. I only found out later that I was talking to millions, and not hundreds.
Did it make a difference? I have no idea.
By the way, I'm sitting in the back of a ballroom between Lisa Williams of H2Otown and Stephen Hill of Hearts of Space.
What happens to public broadcasting now that the public can do it?
"Ice was a fantastic business, for two thousand years... they were probably having conferences like this, talking about ice ponds and straw and shipping routes..." Then in 1873 a guy named Perkins invented refrigeration. "And your ice business was dead." That's Michael Rosenblum, talking at the IMA conference in Boston, in as close to verbatim as short term memory allows. Good talk, so far.
The bDave
Far as I know, nobody other than Dave is thinking out loud about portable podcast player/recorders. Or has a clearer and simpler design concept:
1. Self-contained, untethered synchronization, much the same way a Blackberry gets email.
2. Read-write, two-way, should be able to record and connect with a publishing system for automatic upload and feed production.
3. Must be a platform, that is, people other than the manufacturer can add apps.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
Meanwhile, this device needs a name. It shouldn't be in the Apple mold of "iSomething" or the old pre-eBay mold of "eSomething" either. So I suggest the more existential "bSomething".
Hence the headline.