Brad on Broadcast

Rep Anna Eshoo, D-CA, must really be trying to look busy — witness her repeated introduction of another worthless government mandate. Her goal is to force broadcasters to control loudness. more

The battle for stereoscopic TV delivered to the home just got hotter this month as key players began staking out territory in what promises to be the next VHS-Beta war for supremacy.

A study from the CEA and Entertainment and Technology Center at the University of Southern California claims that 3D is a growing force. The survey shows that 16 percent of respondents wanted 3D films and 14 percent wanted 3D video games. More than 50 percent said they would be willing to wear 3D glasses. Fifteen percent of the respondents said they would be willing to pay a 25 percent premium for a 3D television set. more

Closing keynote speaker at the Broadcast Engineering and B&C News Technology Summit was Ron Stitt, vice president digital media, Fox Television Station (FTS) Group. Stitt is responsible for online operations, business development and strategy for the FTS Group in NYC. He’s been responsible for helping the FTS Web sites grow to an average of almost 10 million monthly unique users.

Stitt began his presentation by saying that the term “TV station” has become a semantic problem for the industry. He said that future success for broadcasters will require stations to radically rethink what they provide and how they provide it. Stations will have to supply much more than just an OTA signal. Going forward, a successful TV station will have to supply owned and branded content to a multitude of platforms, formats and devices. “You can’t be just a TV station,” he claimed. more

There is an absolutely awful movie with the title, “I know what you did last summer.” Well now that kind of “know all” function may about to be installed on your TV. Your TV set will know where you went and when you were there. For some people, that may not be a good thing. For others, it opens a whole new world of features and functions. more

I just returned from the Broadcast Engineering and B&C News Technology Summit, which was held in Atlanta, GA. You can read a report on the conference inside the October issue of Broadcast Engineering. The two-day event was filled with panels and experts covering a range of topics focused on news production and workflow. This year’s conference theme might be described as learning how to do more with less. For me, it was the “less” part that proved troublesome. more

NBC Universal president and CEO Jeff Zucker has to be credited with coming up with what has to be the most memorable media phrase of decade. In addressing content owners’ attempts to profit from digital delivery, he said we’re “exchanging analog dollars for digital pennies.” He updated his comment last May when he changed it to, “We’re up to digital dimes.” more

It isn’t hard to find new ways to tax people. Politicians spend their entire lives trying to perfect the process primarily to keep their offices. The first step in arguing for any new tax is for the politician to declare that some service or product is missing from some group of people. That missing service or product could be healthcare, television, or in this example — broadband. In the eyes of elected officials, the only possible “solution” to such a perceived need is that money be taken from one group and redistributed to the other, in their opinion needy, group. Politicians are such caring people, aren’t they? more