I attended a panel discusion on the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) and EAS this morning. There were reps from FEMA and the FCC there; the session was well attended. The panel talked about the history of EBS and EAS and the evolution to the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS). more

Getting to Las Vegas on Friday night allowed me to attend sessions and classes over the weekend before the official opening of NAB, and it was well worth it. This weekend alone I was able to learn about stereopsis and how we perceive our 3-D world as well is issues facing the creation of 3-D video. We heard what it took to convert the movie Clash of the Titans from 2-D to 3-D in just eight weeks. Attendees saw a live demo of a 3-D camera and how the different adjustments affect the stereo picture.

In another session, we learned about progress on EAS and CAPS and what the 180-day window means as well as when it will begin. CAPS will address alerting all kinds of devices and EAS is now just a part, but a very important part, of this much larger national alert system. more

NAB President and CEO Gordon Smith delivered his first NAB “State of the Industry” opening keynote during the 2010 NAB Show. Below are his prepared remarks. more

VCI Solutions is calling on the media community to support the Build 2010 House Project taking place during the NAB Show in Las Vegas April 11th – 14th. VCI Solutions, Habitat for Humanity Las Vegas, and NAB Show have partnered to frame a house during the NAB Show in three days. Volunteers and donations are needed to complete the house for a family in the Las Vegas area. Show attendees and vendors alike are all encouraged to participate in the building and donating to the project.

There are multiple two-hour time slots available on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday during the NAB Show to volunteer. The times slots with the most need of volunteers are in the afternoon on each day. more

Engineers, traffic professionals, and managers from all over the U.S. gathered at the MGM Hotel in Las Vegas last week to share with peers and hear about PBS plans for 2010 and beyond. The group of around 500 heard presentations on issues including file-based workflow, loudness, compression, traffic issues, grant writing, video quality monitoring, cloud computing, and more. Attendance was up from last year and sponsorships were sold out, pleasing all and allowing PBS to offer scholarships to personnel from a number of stations around the country.

A major focus of the conference is the status of PBS’ NGIS non-real-time distribution system, now in alpha testing by stations. The system will ultimately replace a large portion of its real-time distribution, which requires much of the national content to be locally recorded for later playback. NGIS will deliver content as files to a highly redundant IT-based system deployed by PBS at all 177 of its affiliates. PBS has developed a sophisticated automated workflow (Station Services Platform) that communicates directly with the station’s traffic system. Content is delivered to stations at least 48 hours before air dates, and the system will hold the content for 10 days afterwards to allow stations to copy the content to servers or archives for future playout. more

By Phil Kurz, Broadcast Engineering contributing writer

Omneon is healthy, prosperous and delivering product aimed at tapping into more than simply the market for playout servers.

That was the message Omneon CEO Suresh Vasudevan and Geoff Stedman, senior VP, products and markets, conveyed April 18 to members of the media attending its NAB Show press conference at the Palms Casino Resort.

While many companies struggled last year, Omneon grew 2008 revenues 43 percent, up from its 2007 revenue of $89 million, said Stedman. Perhaps insulating it to a degree from regions with shaky economies, the company reported its revenue is fairly well distributed geographically with the Americas accounting for 42 percent, EMEA 41 percent and APJ 17 percent.

Capping off his description of the company’s financial health, Stedman reported Omneon has a cash position of $34 million with no debt. The proof points seemed intended to emphasize that despite significant challenges in the broadcast industry, Omneon is financially sound and in a position to take the steps necessary to assure continued growth.

To that end, Omneon announced some new products and partnerships aimed at accelerating its growth despite economic uncertainty this year. more

You’ll be hard pressed to find anyone not pleased that today is the last day of this year’s NAB show. Not that the show was bad or anything. It’s just that the intensity needed to bring off such a monumental event wears on participants.

This year’s show attendance fell by 6,000 to just over 105,000. That’s down from last year’s 111,000—if you believe the numbers. Me, I just ask the cabbies. They always seem to know the real attendance figures.

Attendees may not be as tired as exhibitors. But remember that vendors haven’t just been here since Monday, or for four days. Most arrived much earlier to set up booths, attend meetings and coordinate a list of activities. Then there’s the issue of booth set up and tear down. Most attendees have never seen anything but a finished show floor. more

Broadcast Engineering’s Pick Hit awards are the industry’s longest-running product technology awards for broadcast and production. With a 24-year history, Pick Hits are the most prestigious technical awards given at NAB.

At the 2008 NAB Show, a panel of independent judges toured the exhibition floor for three days, looking for innovative technology. They then met to make their selections based on multiple criteria, including the technical and financial improvements the products can bring to a facility’s operation. Our editors and publisher have no vote in the selection process. more

At the TV technology lunchon yesterday Ira Flatow, TV journalist and host of “Talk the Nation,” gave the opening remarks. He joked about how TV has changed so much. He said, at the start of TV, we were all squinting at a tiny black and white screen, and we wanted something bigger and better. Since then we’ve evolved to amazing picture clarity on huge sized displays. But now we WANT to watch video on tiny screens, as more and more people are watching mobile TV on handheld devices. Someone in the audience shouted out “Back to the Future.”

Flatow also discussed the use of avatars during an audio podcast he hosts called “Science Friday” for National Public Radio (NPR). NPR has created a virtual reality community where you literally create a virtual “you” and join a virtual community.

Is this something that TV stations will eventually do as well? I’d be interested to see.

Watch a video of Ira Flatow at the Technology Luncheon on Broadcast Engineering TV.

For more information, visit http://www.sciencefriday.com/, http://www.sciencefriday.com/pages/2007/Aug/hour2_083107.html and http://www.sciencefriday.com/video/090707/virtualworlds090707.html.

This morning, I got the chance to view a live demo of two of the three technologies being considered by the ATSC as a mobile digital TV standard — A-VSB and MPH. The Open Mobile Video Coalition (OMVC) has set up a van in the Central Hall outfitted to recieve two live channel feeds — one UHF and the other VHF — to demonstrate how each system performs.

For the demo, I squeezed myself into the backseat of the van, where a monitoring wall was set up behind the driver and passenger seats. The two main video displays depicted a live, MPH-enabled feed from a local UHF channel and another live, A-VSB-enabled feed from a local VHF channel. According to Victor Tawil, senior vice president of technology for MSTV (which is performing the trials of all the potential ATSC technologies on behalf of the OMVC), the two systems are periodically swapped between each channel, so that the UHF channel might be getting an A-VSB feed and the VHF channel the MPH one. This keeps things as objective as possible, and is also the protocol for the actual field trials of the systems. more