Brad on Broadcast

Chris could barely restrain his anger as he returned to the ENG truck. He’d held his anger in front of the gathering crowd, but the slamming van door left little doubt that he was plenty pissed off.

Just moments earlier, the station’s latest news star had criticized him because the microphone cut out on her first live shot of the evening. It had only been a momentary drop, but the newscaster took the outage personally and launched into Chris as the cause. “I told you yesterday this mike cable needed to be fixed. How come you didn’t replace it or fix it or something?” she intoned. Now, Chris was going to be saddled with her witchy attitude for the entire evening shift. Gawd he hated her smart ass attitude. more

“I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that,” said HAL the omnipotent computer in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The computer’s every-seeing eye looking back at Dave resembles so closely the Google Chrome icon that the comparison is eerie. If that’s not enough to make you wonder what the company has in store next, read on. more

Do you consider yourself successful? In today’s business environment, one definition of being successful might be just having a job. While that answer applies to millions of people, better times will return, and when they do, will your feelings about what you’ve accomplished change? Let’s examine some choices people make that help them define success. more

As if broadcasters and other tower owners don’t have enough to worry about, the bird huggers are back in the news. I spied the Internet article “Will the FCC ever deal with bird-killing mobile phone towers?” on the ARS Web site. Being the ever vigilant editor, I clicked on the title and was greeted with the typical “the sky is falling and our little-bitty, teeny-weeny feathered friends are needlessly being killed by those big bad broadcast and cell towers” story.

The article was weak in information and long in diatribe and vitriol. The focus claim was that millions of birds are needlessly dying because of those horrible broadcast and cell phone towers. Unfortunately for humans, there is a 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which requires protection for these flea-infested, poop-dropping interlopers. That law is now being used as a club against tower owners. more

In the last blog post we discussed how a staff may react to the use of new technology. While management holds the ultimate authority, the implementation of any changes are carried out by the workers. Without the willing acceptance of those workers, the best technology in the world stands little chance of being successful. more

I grabbed the news story from FT.com because it was titled, “U.S. TV prepares for $2 billion ad shortfall.”

OMG, what had I missed? Are broadcasters careening toward disaster? Was the sky falling and I’d missed the forecast?

The news story’s first sentence said, “The U.S. television industry faces a $2 billion slump in advertising revenues during the next four years as advertisers turn away from broadcast and cable networks, according to a new report.”

The second sentence continued, “Digital video recorders that allow viewers to skip through commercials have knocked confidence in broadcast and cable advertising while younger, tech-savvy audiences are deserting their TV sets to spend more time online.” more

By its nature, the broadcast and content production industries are constantly changing. Just when you’ve got the technology mastered, things change and it’s time to regroup. For many, change is exciting — something to be embraced. However, for others change is frightening and to be avoided whenever possible. This difference in personalities (neither is inherently good or bad) is sometimes visible in how people embrace everyday technology. more

“Now that all those greedy broadcasters have had to give up those free channels the government gave them, we can get some real products and services in that space.”

I wanted to crawl through the PC monitor as I read the above excerpt from a blog post. The writer was complaining that TV stations had been sucking up all the spectrum for their greedy owners and was only now reluctantly giving it up because of government mandates. The post was probably being written by some goofball who wouldn’t know Hertz from hurts. more

In this article, we’re going to examine a totally environmentally safe, aka “green,” solution to UPS needs. The focus will be on what are called rotary UPS or flywheel UPS systems. These solutions differ greatly in how they operate, but have unique benefits to both the user and the environment.

In this series, we’ve assumed that the UPS system would be driven by a bank of batteries and backed up by a generator. As explained previously, both battery and generator solutions are not particularly environmentally friendly. They pollute. more