Gazing at faded black-and-white photos from the first CES, which occurred 50 years ago this week in New York, it’s tough not to laugh at the antiquated gear that was considered cutting-edge at the time—fat tube black-and-white TVs when 23 inches was considered “big screen,” giant wood console cabinet TV/record player/radio combos, “portable” TVs that […]
Archive | ATSC
Hungry Mobile Video: Will Next-Generation TV Feed the Beast?
Bandwidth-hungry video is viewed as an insatiable beast by those who are delivering it over crowded networks. Better compression and mobile network advances have relieved some congestion but the flames of UHD and virtual reality are licking at the heels of cellular networks. TV broadcasters think they can help relieve some of that congestion with […]
Next-Generation TV: What’s Next?
Next-generation TV (aka ATSC 3.0) got top billing at the recently concluded U.S. National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) event and for good reason. The need for broadcasters to adopt a next-gen system—especially one that incorporates a blending of terrestrial broadcast and IP—is obvious especially since everything “television” (more and more an amorphous term) is getting […]
The Technology Forest: Don’t Get Lost in the Woods
Believe it or not, there is a somewhat timely pattern to the historical disruption caused by technology advances. Let’s call the individual technology advances the trees, and the profound business and societal impacts from those advances the forest. Individually, these advances may not do much to challenge the status quo, but together, in a compressed […]
Will IP Transform the Broadcast Industry?
It might be argued that the difference between new video-service providers and the old ones (broadcast via cable, satellite and terrestrial) is that the new ones are simply using a different pipe (Internet) to get content into homes and to personal devices. This is true to a point but, of course, overly simplistic. There are […]
The Hybrid TV Vision: Is Common Sense Advancing?
You’ve been invited to a party. The invitation promises a horn of plenty filled with all your favorites (including the premium stuff) and also the individual favorites of your friends, family, neighbors and fellow citizens. In fact, everyone gets anything they want, at any time they want it, from this horn of plenty. Sound too […]
Why the Future of TV Business is Not a Fight Between Broadcast and Unicast
Today’s “win or lose” prism, through which many view the TV business, needlessly discounts a future where there is a hybrid of broadcast and unicast delivery. Headline skimmers and industry partisans feed on tasty, but empty, predictions of utter defeat for all forms of broadcast delivery and superhero-like domination of Internet delivery. However, there is […]
Next-Generation TV: How Broadcast Can Remain Relevant
Spending a couple of days with U.S. TV broadcasters, engineers, and proponents of a next-generation DTT standard this month at the ATSC conference brought home how important flexibility is to survival. Starting in 1998 the world’s broadcasters (with the U.S. and the UK leading the way) began the first commercial transmissions of digital TV signals. […]
Future Gazing at NAB
The big U.S. broadcaster confab (NAB) has come and gone and a few developments and trends stand out in relation to the tectonic shifts occurring in the world of TV*. It’s still not clear whether or not 4K and/or UHDTV has the juice to get consumers to replace TVs sooner than normal, but it’s clear […]
More Meat, Less Sizzle: Hybrid Device Developments at CES
4K displays absorbed much of the virtual ink at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show. This is a somewhat curious choice given the “turned upside down world” of how content travels to those and all other screens. The change in content travel plans may not be as immediately eye-popping as a large flat-screen TV displaying an […]