Archive of the Trends Category

It’s turning out to me a strange last day at the show. Many of the visitors have left, so the show floor is quieter, with exhibitors getting a chance to look around. The show have been very buoyant, in marked contrast to the news from the financial centers as the news from Wall Street comes in.

The show has been a great success, with numbers up around 5% over last year, and the show aisles packed. One focus of the show has been stereoscopic technology, with much talk of broadcast in the near future. Hand-in-hand comes 3G, the wideband infrastructure will support left and right signals over one cable, something AES audio has supported for decades!

Yesterday we chose our PickHit awards, soon to be posted on the our web site, and to be featured in Broadcast Engineering world edition in the November issue. As usual a mix of interesting technology, that goes to show how much innovation there is out there, not only delivering new levels of video and audio quality, but delivering cost-savings in operations. At shows it is easy to be blown away by the technology, but at the end of the day the products are tools to deliver content in order to sell commercials. Compelling high-quality pictures produced in efficient workflows are what improve the bottom line for a station. Business and technology in symbiosis are what drives this business, and that is what excites many of us to be in this sector.

Let us hope that the turmoil in the financial sector does not come to hit the TV business too hard. Anecdotes say that when times are tight, folks stop shopping and dining out — they stay home and watch TV.

IBC2008 offers a glimpse of a new way for viewers and IPTV operators to get a grip — literally — on television viewing at the Orca Interactive stand.

The IPTV middleware provider is showing its new Compass content discovery tool changes the equation when it comes to choosing what to watch. A replacement for EPG and older ways of finding out what’s on the tube — oops, I mean panel — Compass blends a variety of content recommendation engines to build a customized menu of program selections based an individual user’s preferences.

One of those engines taps into the runaway popularity of social networking to bring to the television a very ordinary occurrence, namely friends recommending you watch a specific program or episode. In the Stone Age, I remember friends actually talking about “Dallas” and who shot JR. Did I see this or that episode that held a clue? more