HDTV Magazine Columns

HDTV Almanac - The Power of Aggregated Data

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 05:00:37 -0800

What do people really watch when they watch the SuperBowl? Thanks to the new world of connected entertainment systems, TiVo has a very good idea. By monitoring an anonymous sample of 41,666 households equipped with TiVo DVRs, the company can compile a map of “live and same-day” viewing of content that was watched at “play” [...]

HDTV Expert - March is “Read an eBook Month” – If You’re Canadian, by Ken Werner

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 21:16:23 -0800

Award-winning Canadian eBook and print author Rita Y. Toews (Prometheus, The Centurion, and The Price of Freedom, among others), convinced the Canadian Parliament to name March 2012 as â��Read an eBook Month.â��
How did she do that, HDTVexpert asked in mid-February.Â â��The effort,â�� Toews said, â��was two years in the making.Â I researched how to go [...]

HDTV Almanac - FCC to Revisit “Must Carry” Rules

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 05:00:46 -0800

I’ve already written a bunch about the problems with retransmission fees and how pay-television subscribers get caught in the squeeze between their services and the content providers. Many people don’t realize that there is a fascinating flip-side to this problem, which is known as “must carry”. It works like this.
Every three years, local television broadcasters [...]

HDTV Expert - Notes From The Desert: The 2012 HPA Tech Retreat – Pete Putman

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 15:48:26 -0800

Once again, this yearâ��s program is chock-full of cutting-edge topics and demos.

HDTV Almanac - Over-the-Top Over-the-Air

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 05:00:18 -0800

Would you pay for a service that lets you watch over-the-air broadcasts on your tablet or smartphone? That’s what a company called Aereo (formerly known as “Bamboom“) plans to launch just such a service for New York City residents starting next month.
The company is building a system of thousands of tiny television antennas; each [...]

HDTV Expert - The Flood of USB-powered Monitors is Coming, by Ken Werner

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 16:23:11 -0800

At the ShowStoppers show-within-a-show at CES last month, HP was showing what its European distributors call aÂ ”hot desktop” monitor.Â (This was new to the company, HPâ��s Jim Christensen told me, but it is apparently an already-defined category in Europe.)Â The targeted applications of what HP calls the HP Compaq L2311C Docking Monitor are hotel rooms [...]

Ed's View: TV Wins Again at CES 2012

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 07:45:29 -0800

Having attended consumer electronics shows in various capacities since 1965, I have witnessed the growth and evolution of the CE industry from many different perspectives. Some shows announce revolutionary, even disruptive, technologies; others reflect evolutionary trends.

Although CES is primarily a near-market hardware show, increasingly dominant themes are based on enabling technologies. For example...

HDTV Almanac - The Big Three Networks

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 05:00:15 -0800

Everything seems to come in threes. We had the Big Three Automakers in Detroit. There were those little pigs. And then there were the major television networks: Netflix, Amazon, and Google.
Wait a minute; what happened to ABC, CBS, and NBC?
From where I sit, that is ancient history. The traditional networks are dead men walking, and [...]

HDTV Almanac - Why TV Subscribers Change

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 05:00:59 -0800

A new report from Centris indicates that more than one out of five pay-TV subscribers intend to change providers, change their level of service, or cancel entirely in the next three months. About half of these will change the program package that they have, which means that the other half will switch to a [...]

One Installer's Opinion: CES, by the Numbers.....

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 07:43:04 -0800

On the odd chance your TV was disabled during the second week of January and you missed the evening news during that half-fortnight, C.E.S. is the Consumer Electronics Show held annually in the city of conspicuous power consumption, Las Vegas, Nevada.

HDTV Almanac - Retransmission Fees: Who Is Winning?

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 05:00:02 -0800

As I have mentioned recently, one of the big topics for 2012 will be the dispute over retransmission fees. Cable and satellite service providers complain that the content producers are holding their customers hostage in order to extort larger fees for the rights to rebroadcast their copyrighted programming. The result has been blackouts of channels [...]

HDTV Almanac - Shed Some Light on Sports Blackouts

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:00:42 -0800

Last Thanksgiving weekend, the NFL Cleveland Browns travelled in-state to play the Cincinnati Bengals. The game was not a sell-out, and under FCC rules, the Bengals exercised their option to blackout the over-the-air broadcast of the game on local television stations in Cincinnati, Dayton, and Lexington. This decision raised the ire of thousands of Bengal [...]

HDTV Expert - Useful Gadgets: Channel Master CM-7400 TV

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 11:45:53 -0800

Channel Masterâ��s CM-7400 TV product (yes, thatâ��s what itâ��s called) provides both over-the-air (DTTB) reception AND Hulu streaming and apps. How well does it work?

HDTV Almanac - You Can’t Touch This!

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 05:00:34 -0800

Touch is transforming our entertainment experience. Second-screen tablets and smartphones are programming our DVR services, delivering supplementary and interactive social content to linear programming, and becoming content delivery platforms in their own right. And while there still is a place for keyboard in this brave new world, touch interfaces are playing an increasingly-important role in [...]

HDTV Almanac - Redbox Rising

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 05:00:20 -0800

The physical DVD is dead; long live streaming!
That’s the conventional wisdom, but I’ve got a dollar that says rumors of the DVD’s death are premature. Why a dollar? Because that’s what it costs to rent a DVD from one of those big red vending machines that you see everywhere from Walmart to McDonalds (not to [...]