Looking for some companies to visit at the NAB Show? Want an idea of what kinds of products will be on display? Here are but a few of the products already announced that may want to put on your must-see list.
High-performance 9in production monitor
Panasonic’s BT-LH910 is a powerful 9in LCD monitor for field and studio applications. Breakthrough features include a new high-brightness, high-contrast IPS panel; newly developed 3-D assist functions; and professional interfaces including HDMI and 3G-SDI. This monitor is at home as an electronic viewfinder on location as well as in mobile or live settings. more…
CMMB America, together with Canadian technology provider Unique Broadband Systems (UBS) and Hong Kong affiliate CMMB Vision, announced the successful demonstration of Converged Multimedia Mobile Broadcasting (CMMB) mobile TV signals for the first time over cellular network frequencies in a trial demonstration near Denver.
The demonstration represents the first United States-based field test for CMMB and signifies the company’s attempt to position CMMB for its commercial launch of services in the U.S. market. The company says the results validate CMMB’s ability to cohabitate with cellular technologies as well as its superior coverage over varying line of sight and non-line of sight environments. more…
On Wednesday, March 9, I introduced you to some in the new line of Sony products to be revealed at this year’s NAB convention. The information was gleaned from a trip to Japan that included visits to three different Sony corporate locations. With that as background, let’s continue with a look at some new Sony technology. more…
Sony executives last week invited a selection of 10 key editors from the United States to visit three company facilities in Japan. The editorial trip included meetings at the Atsugi Technology Center, near Tokyo; Sony’s worldwide headquarters in downtown Tokyo; and the Sony image sensor factory in Kumamoto, Japan. This combination of high-intensity (and long) days of meetings allowed me to better understand some of Sony’s newest products and get an inside look at this wealth of new technology. Much of what I saw will be shown to the public for the first time at this year’s NAB show.
Over the next few days and weeks, I’ll treat Broadcast Engineering readers to a behind-the-scenes look at some of Sony’s plans and new technology. Armed with this information, I’m sure you’ll want to see for yourself at the show what the engineers at Sony have been up to. more…
We were in the middle of a discussion one day and someone raised the reasonable question, “What do your readers want to know?”
“I’ll ask them,” I said.
Just what kind of special, in-depth technical information would you like to receive? Is there a series of topics you’d like covered in a more intense way that just a monthly article? Perhaps a series of tutorials that could create a solid groundwork of education from which you and your employees could build career expertise? more…
Last week I witnessed what amounts to the fourth ownership change for Grass Valley since its inception. Founded in 1959 by Donald Hare in Grass Valley, CA, the company merged with Tektronix in 1974, and private investor Terry Gooding purchased the Grass Valley business in 1999. He then sold it to the French company Thomson SA in 2002.
Nothing against the French, but that ownership always seemed rocky. From my discussions with many GV personnel, the relationship between American and Technicolor’s French management was often strained. I more fully recognized one key symbol of the French style of management when GV press releases began listing the value of equipment sales in euros. I asked the Americans why a sale of equipment made in Grass Valley, CA, to a broadcast network in New York would be valued in euros. The paraphrased answer was, “Because that’s what they (the French) want.” more…
Are you satisfied with the price and service, called value proposition, from your cable/satellite company? According to survey after survey, probably not.
According to an October 2010 study from J. D. Power and Associates, customer satisfaction with the cost of subscription TV service averaged 541 on a 1000-point scale in 2010. That’s down 14 points since 2009. Customers of traditional cable providers are particularly dissatisfied with their cost of service. Satisfaction with fairness of prices paid among cable customers is 22 percent lower than among customers of telephone company providers (such as AT&T and Verizon) and 18 percent lower than among customers of satellite providers (such as DIRECTV and DISH). more…
Scanning my daily list of RSS feeds, I spied an article titled, “Meat producers should replace cattle with insects.” Okay, I’ll bite, what’s this about?
It seems that a bunch of scientists at Wageningen University in the Netherlands (think IBC) put their heads together and discovered that insects are highly efficient in producing “meat.” I put the word meat in quotes because, as you will soon see, these scientists use the word meat differently than you or I might. more…
There’s plenty of good news for broadcasters at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES). No, I’m not talking about 3-D television; I’m talking about mobile TV. more…
Perhaps, not surprisingly, the FCC has launched a bid to require a new universal gateway device to replace the failed CableCARD program. According to the commission, the action would encourage the adoption of broadband and develop new retail sales of set-top boxes (STBs). The program is called AllVid. more…
Panasonic’s BT-LH910 is a powerful 9in LCD monitor for field and studio applications. Breakthrough features include a new high-brightness, high-contrast IPS panel; newly developed 3-D assist functions; and professional interfaces including HDMI and 3G-SDI. This monitor is at home as an electronic viewfinder on location as well as in mobile or live settings. more…
