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Monthly Archive for April, 2007

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Preview of NY Times’ New Greener Digs

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Apartment Therapy has a few snaps of the soon to be home for The New York Times. The new digs are not only modern but also green making maximum use of natural light as opposed to relying on electric lighting by having open glass design, automatic louvers to limit or increase natural light, dimming Lutron flourescents, air conditioning coming from the floor as opposed to the ceiling and managing the bottom 6′ where people actually need it.

And what looks like miles of Cat5e cabling

Apartment Therapy – The New NYTimes BuildingNY Times building gallery

Sharron Melton Heading Home

I missed this in all the spam but Sharon Melton is leaving WSVN heading back to Texas. Her last day at WSVN is this Sunday April 22nd

She’s originally from San Antonio, TX

Hat tip John

Update: Brandon in comments: Sharron is moving to KTRK the Houston ABC affiliate.

Miami Herald says she’ll anchor the weekday morning newscasts from 5-7am.
Nice promotion!

MiamiHerald Notables /bottom of page/

He doesn’t like the local news

CNN’s Miles O’Brien hosted a live RTNDA opening session and had his 14 year old son join in via web cam. During live Q&A the boy was asked if he watched local news his reply? He doesn’t like local news – “all they talk about is murders and rapes and killings.”

O’Brien’s daughter also made an appearance via webcam and she too was asked if she watched local news.  “No,” she said. “It scares me.”

In 5 years when these two, along with their peers, become the target demo we’ll be seeing news heads wondering again where have all the demo viewers gone.

Lost Remote – RTNDA opening session – interesting read

TV4US, WeWantChoice is AT&T not a consumer group

You have probably seen the ad with a shot of cash piled on a table while a voice tells you how the evil cable companies don’t want you to have choice and don’t want millions of Floridians to save millions of dollars on their cable bills. The commercial ends with “Paid for by TV4US” and a url www.wewantchoice.com

TV4US is an astroturf – a front group paid for by AT&T that makes advertising that looks like it’s made by consumer groups. AT&T is building a VDSL based video distribution service called Uverse to compete with Comcast and instead of negotiating franchise contracts with every town they, as Comcast had to, they are lobbying Florida and other states to let them have video franchise contracts directly from the state, skipping towns, and deploying their service faster.

This would be all fine and dandy, the ad makes you think that more choice equals lower fees, except that AT&T has stated their Uverse service won’t be competing with cable companies on price. Thus the money argument is rendered useless. AT&T wants elimination of city franchise commissions in favor of state ones and Comcast doesn’t want the competition and doesn’t like AT&T getting off easy.

By the way Comcast also has a front group running ads on local tv here in South Florida and other places, I forget what their name is but the ad usually runs first then followed by commercial for a Comcast service.

“The notion of competing just on price doesn’t make sense to us,” said Jeff Weber, AT&T’s vice president of product and strategy, who added that the company will not lead on price.

XchangeMag

CommonCause.org – Telecom Front Groups and Astroturfing

CommonCause.org – TV4US – ‘corporate money not citizen power’

BroadbandReports – AT&T Won’t Compete on Price

XChangeMag – Evolving the U-verse ecosystem

WSVN HD now panoramic mode a.k.a. Stretch-o-Vision

Well WSVN have fixed whatever issues they had with the hardware and flipped the switch ON for stretch-o-vision dubbed such by HDTV enthusiasts. Also known as panoramic stretching, and non-linear stretching, it takes the corners of a 4:3 broadcast and stretches it to fit 16:9 format leaving the center intact but making for some funny looking anchors.

WPLG’s use of panoramic stretching has been hated by the local HDTV fanboys ever since the station began using it. Some of them outright blocking WPLG from their receivers while others going a step further and mentiong the b-word, as in boycott because according to them WPLG management isn’t listening to the presumed flood of complaints. Some  emailed  Laurie Jennings and Dwight Lauderdale telling them they look fat in panoramic mode and hoping for intervention but so far WPLG management is sticking to its decision.

The problem with panoramic stretching is that even if one uses their set top box or TV’s ability to scale video back to 4:3 the distortion is still happening unlike with anamorphic stretching which simply pulls a 4:3 picture to fit 16:9 format and is easily scaled back.

AVS Forum Miami HDTV discussion