June 2009

One Acorn Too Many

I guess us TV engineers don't visit YouTube often enough. Funny video about repairing a microwave fading problem:

One Acorn Too Many

(Courtesy of www.Tech-Notes.TV)

Almost Everybody Into the Pool

And the number one market bows to the inevitable. From Broadcasting & Cable:

“The pool will open just in time for the sticky New York summer, as WNYW, WNBC, WPIX and WCBS commence a video-sharing local news service June 22…”

Land of the Lost

I have often (well not that often) blogged about the sad state of television news. My own twenty-something daughter gets all the news she needs from cnn.com, PerezHilton.com and The Daily Show. (In spite of the fact that I am working for a CNN competitor.) The day of the 6 PM local news and the 6:30 network news is waning rapidly, along with a parallel decline in viewing of the "big four" English language networks in general.

The dire longterm prognosis has filtered down to (or hit over the head) the troops at the local level as this post by Lenslinger in his Viewfinder Blues blog attests:

"...the economy could correct itself overnight and the broadcast landscape would still buckle under the weight of new expectations. Sure, magic laptops and boned-up telephones play a part but all the gizmos in the universe fail in the face of human nature. Take my oldest daughter (Pease - she’s FIFTEEN!). I’ve yet to buy her one of those cell phones that comes with its very own flux capacitator, but that hasn’t stopped her from consuming news the way her better-equipped peers do. Al A Freakin’ Cart. ...When she wants to learn about the world she knows the libraries of the globe are just a Google or two away."

Take the time to read his whole post, it's pretty much what I've been thinking (except that I work at the national level and am watching the network crumble around me.)

And Henry Blodget says all is lost. DuMont, anyone?

Experience

"Experience is a wonderful thing. It enables us to recognize our errors each time we make them again."

(From some engineering magazine that I read while I was trying to become an Electrical Engineer.)