January, 2008 | HD TV PROFESSOR

Month: January 2008

Dueling Surveys

January 31, 2008 | Author: Muneeb Mannan

We're fast approaching the start of the one-year countdown to the end of analog over-the-air transmission by local television broadcasters. The US Congress has been concerned that Americans may not be aware of the transition to digital broadcasts, or of the government rebate program for digital converters. A survey commissioned by the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) paints a rosy picture of the situation. According to a press release yesterday,...

I Want My IPTV!

January 30, 2008 | Author: Muneeb Mannan

Regular readers of the HDTV Almanac know that I'm a big proponent of what the Internet will do for video entertainment. The ability to watch what you want, where you want, when you want is a powerful development that will change everything. It's easy to suppose such a position in theory, but it's even better when you can cite some statistics that point in that direction. Last week, Ensequence came...

DVDs on Demand

January 29, 2008 | Author: Muneeb Mannan

A lot of movies have been made. Talk about an understatement! The Internet Movie Database currently lists close to half a million different titles. It's a safe bet that only a small fraction of those titles are available on DVD, because the market for many of them is so small that it's not worth gearing up a production run of even a few thousand copies. But all that is set...

Flicker Makes a Comeback?

January 28, 2008 | Author: Muneeb Mannan

About 20 years ago, when CRT computer monitors started to get bigger than about 14" diagonal, people started to notice an annoying flicker on their screens. It appears that history may be repeating itself, and researchers are looking for ways to eliminate flicker from large HDTVscreens. A paper in the Journal of the Society for Information Display from the School of Electronic Engineering at Southeast University in Nanjing, China and...

Digital TV $10 Billion Dividend

January 25, 2008 | Author: Muneeb Mannan

One of the main reasons for switching from analog to digital broadcast of television signals is that you can send more content over a digital signal than you can over an analog one. (This is also why digital broadcasts are required in order to send out high definition signals.) So all the television stations got new channels for their digital broadcasts, and as of February 17, 2008, their analog channels...

HD DVD Dominated Player Sales

January 24, 2008 | Author: Muneeb Mannan

Was Warner Brothers hasty in dumping HD DVD? Or was the Sony Blu-ray camp clever in engineering the defection so that it could get out in front of some difficult news. A press release from DisplaySearch reports that sales of Toshiba's HD DVD models accounted for 64% more of the stand alone devices sold in North America during the first three quarters of 2007. On the other hand, Blu-ray dominated...

HDTV Almanac on the Air

http://audio.cbsnews.com/2008/01/23/audio3741841.mp3

January 23, 2008 | Author: Muneeb Mannan

I got a call from Larry Magid, tech guru for CBS News who had some questions for his article about buying an HDTV. One thing led to another, and he ended up posting our conversation as a podcast to accompany his article. Click here to listen to the interview. We're coming down the stretch for this year's HDTV buying season; interest drops way off after the SuperBowl, and we'll probably...

HDTV Eyes?

January 22, 2008 | Author: Muneeb Mannan

Technology Research News is a wonderful site that reports on a wide range of scientific papers and studies that point toward possible future technologies. Yesterday, they cited a paper from the 21st IEEE International Conference on Micro Electro Mechanicals Systems (MEMS 2008). If you're still with me, that's great because this is really cool. The researchers created contact lenses with embedded LED displays. They tested them on rabbits who wore...

More Broadband Movie Delivery

January 21, 2008 | Author: Muneeb Mannan

The New York Post reports today that content from Time Warner's HBO network will be available over broadband. The initial rollout is very limited in scope, but there are indications that the availability will expand. The service will provide on demand access to 600 movie titles and about 4,000 hours of original programming including "The Sopranos" and "Six Feet Under". What will this cost? If you're a Time Warner cable...

Netflix Offers All-You-Can-Eat Streaming Movies

January 18, 2008 | Author: Muneeb Mannan

Monday's press release from Netflix says it all: "Beginning today, all Netflix subscribers on unlimited rental plans, which start as low as $8.99 a month, will be able to stream as many movies and TV episodes as they want on their PCs, choosing from a library of over 6,000 familiar movies and TV episodes." Bang! No more walks to the mailbox for customers, and no more inventory or postage or...