Brad on Broadcast

If you’re in the content mastering or transcoding business, you know AmberFin. If not, let me introduce you to the company.

AmberFin (exhibiting at NAB booth SU4323) is privately held by Advent Venture Partners and is part of the Snell & Wilcox Group, headquartered in Basingstoke, UK. Its solutions focus on enabling content owners to maximize the value of their TV, film and video content and increase those revenues by reducing costs, saving time and eliminating incompatibility issues. more…

My good, long-time friend Joe Zaller, VP corporate development for Snell & Wilcox (exhibiting at NAB booths SU1917 and SU1717), joined me for an NYC breakfast last week and used the opportunity to highlight some the company’s new products for NAB 2009. Prior to the meeting, he forwarded a PowerPoint presentation and asked that I bring it with me.

Alas, I tried. Unfortunately, the Hilton Garden Inn had only one business center printer — and it was busted. I asked the front desk how the hotel only had one printer and was told, “We’ll fix it. Just come back later.” I thought, “OK, but my meeting is now …”

Despite not having a copy of the requisite PowerPoint presentation, Zaller was kind enough to walk me through his copy of the document. He highlighted some of the new IQ Modular intelligent infrastructure range, which offers more than 400 intelligent component building blocks. This includes 26 new 3Gb/s-capable modules. more…

If I told you I was in the “Windy City,” you’d probably think I was in Chicago. Normally that’d be true, but last Thursday, the very windy city was NYC. With 50mph winds whipping through Manhattan, it became a real challenge to navigate from my hotel to lunch with my friend Dave Walton from JVC.

Later, I discovered that the news Dave and JVC’s Digital Video Division VP, Larry Librach, had to show me was well worth the walk from my hotel to the nearby Tribeca Grill at 375 Greenwich St. at the corner of Franklin Street. (See, I can find my way around Manhattan. If you missed the story of me getting lost in wonderful lower Manhattan, check it out.)

Let me cut to the chase about our luncheon meeting. While the food was really good, it was JVC’s new camera that blew me away. more…

The next stop on my pre-NAB press conference tour was OmniBus, exhibiting at booth SU5417 at the NAB Show. I remember when Broadcast Engineering’s IBC Pick Hits judges tried to award a Pick Hit to OmniBus for its iTX back in September 2008. The problem was, the company wasn’t ready to announce the product and had only shown it to a limited number of attendees. Our judges were well ahead of other convention awards.

Broadcast Engineering readers will recognize the iTX as an enterprise-class automation system that provides a configurable and responsive end-to-end solution for a wide array of operating environments — ranging from mobile to IPTV and from centralized multichannel operations through to single-channel stations. Building upon its extensive SD capabilities, iTX now delivers 1080p24 and built-in Dolby 5.1 capability. more…

The weather in NYC was absolutely wonderful last Wednesday. Thursday was an entirely different matter, but we’ll get to that later.

The next stop on my NYC tour was a meeting to review the new products from Scopus Video Networks (exhibiting at NAB booth SU10917). Of particular note, Scopus will debut its multiformat, dense decoder and descrambler based on its flagship Integrated Receiver Processor (IRP) — Dense Decoder and Descrambler. more…

Last week I made the yearly trek to meet several clients in the New York City area. The annual event permits me to visit with NAB exhibitors and learn more about their upcoming announcements.

After an invigorating run around lower Manhattan and across the Brooklyn Bridge, I had breakfast with Carolyn Archambault, a long-time friend and PR for a wealth of clients. One of the companies she and I talked about was Bridge Technologies.

This may be a new company to some Broadcast Engineering readers. At this year’s NAB convention, Bridge Technologies will be exhibiting in Sencore booths SU4412 and N2530. Bridge Technologies develops and manufactures analysis, measuring and monitoring solutions for the broadcast and telecom industries. more…

Well, Feb. 17 came and went. We’re still alive. The sky didn’t fall.

Unless you’re Rip Van Winkle, you know that Feb. 17 was the original analog shutoff date. More than 400 stations made that switch on time, and guess what? Armageddon didn’t occur.

Even so, Washington still managed to screw things up. At the last minute, politicians decided that further delay wouldn’t cost them anything, so they imposed one. And, the politicians knew that adding a delay would provide plenty of political cover if voters got mad about the transition. “Hey, don’t blame me,” they could say.

I’ve received a fair bit of mail on the DTV conversion, so let me share some of it with you. Here’s what Broadcast Engineering readers think of the delay: more…

Let me give you some advice about hotels in New York City. Don’t pick one that’s located in some off-the-wall location or on an unfamiliar street — even if it is part of a common chain. You’ll regret it.

I traveled to NYC last week to attend a series of press conferences. To avoid as many taxi charges as possible, I usually try to stay near the main event hotel. Using Google Maps, I located the press conference hotel and selected a hotel nearby.

I won’t bother telling you the hotel’s name because I’m not complaining about the actual hotel. Suffice it to say that it was located at 6 York Street. During my three-day stay in NYC, not one of the taxi drivers I used was able to locate the hotel. Even Google couldn’t accurately find it. more…

My alternate title for this post: How I learned to hate broadcasters and everything they stand for.

Broadcasters should be ashamed of themselves. To quote a New American Foundation brief, “The Lobby that Cried Wolf,” “The one constant has been the broadcast industry’s unyielding opposition to new uses of the broadcast spectrum, or to any new technology that poses even the slightest threat to their bottom line.”

Benjamin Lennett, senior program associate for the Wireless Future Program at the New American Foundation, wrote that this paper “provides a glimpse of broadcasters’ lobbying path of deception, highlighting recent campaigns to keep others out of their spectrum and offering parallels with the current campaign against white space devices.”

According to Mr. Lennett, TV and radio broadcasters have been scheming since the early 1930s to keep away any competition. more…

Remember the movie “Network?” Released 1976, it presented a frenetic and satirical view of a fictional television network, Union Broadcasting System (UBS), and its struggle with poor ratings. The single identifying element from this movie is the phrase, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” The UBS evening news anchor, Howard Beale, played by Peter Finch, persuades the American TV audience to echo his frustrations about life by shouting the above phrase out their windows.

Today, broadcasters across the nation are lining up in force to tell the U.S. Congress the same thing, “We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore.” more…