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 | HDTV
Emerging Markets Have Different Ideas about the Latest Video Tech
Many of the new video-tech tools are delivering the latest premium viewing experience (Ultra HDTV) to consumers mainly in developed economies. You’d be forgiven for assuming that the latest compression technologies’ sole purpose is to enable the delivery of UHD video to high-end TV displays. This application of the new technology gets all the attention, […]
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 […]
How Will TV Makers Compete With VR?
At some point, VR will be a really big thing. Isn’t it big now, you ask? Not really. Sure, everyone in technology is talking about VR. But in terms of objective numbers such as hardware sales, content downloads and household penetration rates, VR isn’t anything more than anticipatory buzz at the moment. But, VR will […]
An Olympic Surprise
The Olympics is a chance for the world’s best athletes to test their mettle against their well-trained (and occasionally well-medicated) peers. But the games are more than a display of physical prowess; they’re a chance for the broadcast industry to flex its technological muscles as well. The 2016 Summer Olympics in Brazil will be no […]
Why the UHD Transition is NOT the HDTV Transition
If you’re feeling some weird sense of déjà vu with the chicken-egg conundrum surrounding the production of 4K content/broadcasting and UHD TV sales, it’s because you have vague recollections of the introduction of HDTV back in the late 1990s. While there are definite similarities between these multi-million pixel TV transitions, there are several tipping-point differences […]
HDBaseT: The New HDMI?
Remember a couple of months back I wrote how 4K UHD TVs currently being sold by Samsung, Sony and LG, and other 4K UHD sets that will go on sale this year, would be incompatible with future 4K broadcast, streaming, download and Blu-ray formats and that a new HDMI 2.0 standard would be needed to […]
The Widening Technology Gap
In another life, I write about consumer electronics for, shall we say, a less digitally informed audience than the readers of this blog. As I transverse between these parallel universes (and, no, there’s no goateed Mr. Spock in the other one), I am constantly reminded of the growing chasm between those who are as comfortable […]
UHD’s Chicken-Egg Catch-22
New media technologies always present a chicken-egg conundrum. Usually, the Catch-22 is content v. hardware – why would anyone buy the hardware if there’s no content, but why would anyone produce content if no one is buying the new hardware? This was the content/hardware conundrum faced by HDTV, for instance. Broadcasters were hesitant to produce […]
Where’s My OLED HDTV?
For awhile, it seemed, we were free from 1980’s-style vaporware from major equipment manufacturers. Apparently not. At last year’s CES, Samsung and LG elbowed each other over “first-ever” recognition for their respective 55-inch, pencil-thin next-generation OLED HDTVs. Each company intimated, if not outright promised, we’d be knee-deep in OLED HDTVs before the end of this […]