Brad on Broadcast

The Federal Communications Commission’s director of scenario planning, Phil Bellaria, claims we all misunderstood the agency’s intentions to take away TV broadcast spectrum. He’s now gone on the record saying the commission never “seriously” considered implementing such a plan. Rather, the commission was looking at “a scenario that establishes a voluntary marketplace mechanism so that broadcast TV stations have a choice in how they want to use their spectrum.”

I guess that means you can keep your spectrum. For now. more

OK, let’s first view the glass as half full. NBCU claims it has doubled the amount of coverage for this year’s Winter Olympic Games. This will be the first time the entire event will be shot in HD, encompassing almost 835 hours total coverage across all 15 sporting events. This compares to 419 hours from Torino in 2006 and just over 375 hours from Salt Lake City in 2002. The coverage will air across NBC, USA, MSNBC, CNBC, Universal HD and NBC Olympics.com. For Web streaming viewing, NBC will again rely on Microsoft’s Silverlight player. more

This year’s Las Vegas CES convention was filled with people, products and perhaps a little smoke and mirrors. But hey, that’s to be expected at any product convention. Here are a couple of announcements that caught my attention.

3-D television the next home revolution?

The number one theme was 3-D television. Not only were almost 50 3-D television sets released, several content producers announced plans to begin broadcasting 3-D programming. more

Searching for the next big consumer gold mine, electronic giant LG recently inked a deal with Skyview Korea to bring 3-D programming to Asian viewers. LG will make the sets; Skyview will provide satellite delivery of the 3-D content. more

Both broadband and civil rights were on the minds of some at a Dec. 14 Memphis, TN, town hall meeting. FCC commissioner Michael Copps said, “Universal access to broadband needs to be seen as a civil right … [while] not many people have talked about it that way.” more

Yep, that brain-busting statistic is from a Q3 Nielsen study. The report says that in Q3 2009, the average American watched more than 31 hours of television per week. Thirty-one minutes of that time was sourced from a DVR. While TV viewing is down 29 minutes from the same period in 2008, that’s to be expected because there wasn’t the Beijing Olympics or a presidential election. more

In the last article, we discussed several types of studio lighting, including incandescent, halogen and LED. If you missed that resource, read it before continuing this series.

We’ll begin this part’s discussion by looking at a lamp technology that everyone loves to hate: the compact fluorescent lamp (CFL). more