February 13, 2006
CNN Enhanced on Dish is in the Wild...
TVWeek (free registration required) may have been the first to report this, under the headline 'Interactive TV Gets a Big Boost' - CNN has launched their first major one-screen interative TV application. I was the product manager on this effort, and it's great to see the trades picking up on it. If you have Dish, please check it out and let me know your thoughts. The app combines photos and stories from CNN.com you can read while the CNN linear network continues to play in squeezeback. So for those couch potatoes among us who want a little more control over your news, this one's for you! The TV Week story goes on with an interesting quote from Ian Olgeirson, an analyst with Kagan Research: "Certainly, being able to deploy the application to more than a small amount of customers is pretty critical to making the model work on any level," he said. Still, ITV is not likely to lure new customers, he said."
- TV Newser has also picked this up.
- CNNMoney.com has the PRNewswire story.
- Multichannel News and UPI also have short mentions.
- What's Happening at CNN has a slew of screenshots.
technorati tags: cnn, echostar, itv, etv, dish network
technorati tags: opentv
Posted by jetrotz at 03:58 PM | Comments (0)
December 17, 2005
Happy Happy Joy Joy
I'm happy to announce that the Trotz household has finally entered the HDTV-age. Since I've been working for a broadcast company heavily involved in HD technologies for the last several years, I've been eager to experience this at home. After much research, agonizing, and negotiations with my lovely wife, we purchased a Sony KDS-R50XBR1 Grand Wega SXRD rear projection television last weekend. We talked about buying the 60" version - Best Buy was selling both the 50 and 60 for the same price - but Amy knew that the 60" would be waaaay to big for our living room.
I finally cancelled my DirecTV service last week - the constant outages and costs to upgrade to support HD (a new dish for $300, a new HD-DVR for $500-1000, new boxes for my other two rooms ($250+)). So we've been enjoying free over-the-air HD. It's kinda sick that there is such a beautiful TV signal just floating in the air for anyone to pickup. I'm looking forward to today's visit from the Comcast guy however - they should be bringing Motorola's latest and greatest - the 6412 dual-tuner DVR. That baby has all sorts of features I'm eager to check out, including the ability to output recorded HD content over it's Firewire ports to a Mac.I can finally get back to seeing how our own networks look, especially the Law and Order HD channel. Oops, I mean TNT!
technorati tags: sxrd, lcos, sony, hdtv
Some useful links about the new setup:
- Sound & Vision Magazine's review that convinced me this was probably the set to buy
- Product page on Sonystyle.com
- Samsung's 50" 1080p, the HL-R5078W
Anyway, for those among you interested in the sordid geeky details of why I choose this one - it uses 'SXRD' (Silicon X-tal Reflective Display - a new display technology developed by Sony as a variant of the better-known LCOS or Liquid Crystal on Silicon. This spiffy set uses three separate panels (one each for red, blue and green) and projects these onto the screen for a 1920x1080p HDTV image. I considered the 1080p series from both Samsung and HP, but several reviews sold me on the Sony based on the better controls and details offered by their SXRD format. There's also the missing 'color wheel' used in traditional DLP - there, instead of having three panels there's a single one with an RGB color wheel spinning in front. I've heard various reports of costly repairs to replace those. And while I never saw them in the store, some users do report a 'rainbow' effect on some high-key source material (think white-on-white scenes with pans and zooms).
This set is the 3rd generation of Sony SXRD technology, and the first in the price range of mere mortals (compared to the Qualia 70" at over $10k or their first version at $27k a few years back).
The .61" panel in this set is the worlds smallest, and combined with some signal processing produces a contrast ratio of 10,000:1, and a response time of less than 5ms - good enough for the highest action video sources. At this size, and via what Sony claims is an exclusive manufacturing process (until they license it I guess), the narrow spacing they provide between pixels in the panels elminates the well-known DLP 'screen-door' effect.
Posted by jetrotz at 08:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 09, 2005
iChatAV on CNN's Situation Room
You go Wolf! On the debut of Wolf Blitzer's new show yesterday, our favorite blog reporters Jacki Schechner and Abbi Tatton held a webcam interview with Joichi Ito, who then wrote about the interview on his blog. Joichi explains that Abbi had found him via a mention on another weblog (BuzzMachine) where Jeff Jarvis discussed Ito's op-ed piece on the anniversary of the use of nuclear weapons over Japan. Macworld UK also talks about the use of the technology.
Link: Macworld UK talks about the use of iChatAV on CNN
Link: Ito talks about his appearance on CNN
Link: CNN's show page for The Situation Room
Update: TVNewser has a round up on reax to the first broadcast.
Posted by jetrotz at 07:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 10, 2005
Shut the Fox Up!
The New York Daily News is reporting an a curious gadget designed to filter out the Fox News Channel. The little device screws in-line between your incoming TV signal and the RF input on your television (standard cable only) and blocks Fox News. Pretty damn funny.
Posted by jetrotz at 08:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 07, 2005
Fox News Remains Partisan, Less Capable in Tsunami Coverage
The recent natural disaster of biblical proportions points out Fox News lack of resources compared to it's biggest rival, according to this column at Salon.com (membership required, or watch a short commercial for a day pass to read this story). The article points out a limited amount of staff dispatched to the region by Fox (while CNN has 75+ in the affected countries) and lots of partisan us v. them discussion. My favorite is this bit about a Fox host thinking out loud about where the relief money was going.
Fox host John Gibson bemoaned the fact that U.S. relief -- getting water, food and shelter to millions of destitute people -- might be part of an insurance scam to simply pay for the cost of rebuilding a resort community. "This is the travel industry, major big hotel companies," he said last week. "How is it that United States taxpayers are going to be convinced you have to build hotels in Phuket?" He worried aloud that "Thailand, Indonesia, India, the countries that got hit [will] say, 'We need dough and we need buckets of it to fix all this so Swedes can go on vacation in Phuket again.'"
Hey, dumb#@%! There are close to 200k dead from this thing, and you are talking about the possibility some money might revitalize a Thai resort? Give me a break!
Posted by jetrotz at 10:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack