Almost two months ago, Joel Connable returned to the South Florida TV screens in the form of Travel TV News. Check out his brand new and updated site here: TravelTVNews.com.
Archive for the ‘Links’ Category
WFOR's New Doppler 4D
WFOR CBS4 just launched a new cool weather radar this Thursday! They call it Doppler 4D, and it’s like nothing else in the South Florida TV news market. According to Craig Setzer’s Inside Weather Scoop Blog:
“A typical radar view is two dimensional. It is also typically the lowest “slice” out of a thunderstorm and indicates the intensity of rain (or possibly hail) falling out of the storm. If you loop the image you add the dimension of time and how the storm is changing over time. This, in some respects is three dimensions. We can also look at a radar image in the form of a “range height indicator” or RHI. Then you not only see a horizontal slice of the storm, but a vertical slice as well.”
“[…] So simple intensity of the storm is important and that’s what most radars show, but Doppler 4D shows the entire depth of the storm, revealing details we rarely see. Potential hail, extreme winds, even tornadoes show up when viewed in this much detail.”
With hurricane season already a month old, and a tropical weather system inevitable, this may be an edge WFOR needs. It seems to be common knowledge that WTVJ doesn’t have a chance in hell of gaining any viewers this hurricane season with their (small) all-star weather team – but WFOR has a chance. Read more of this personal opinion in the SFLTV Forums.
A new concept for national news? The technology is called Auto-Tune, and if you’ve ever listened to modern day artists like Kanye West, you’ve heard Auto-Tune technology. A 24-year-old Brooklyn musician named Michael Gregory has combined a number of TV news clips, and turned them into rather catchy songs. For those not “in the know,” Auto-Tune is a software program that alters singers’ voices to achieve perfect pitch.
“So in addition to making fun of nightly news coverage, Gregory has also shown us how ridiculously easy it is to make someone sound like a C-rated pop star (this also explains the musical “careers” of Brooke Hogan and Heidi Montag).” TIME Magazine’s Claire Suddath says.
Here’s two videos demonstrating how entertaining Auto-Tune can be:
Doesn’t Katie Couric sound great? Very catchy. View their full channel here.
This newsletter went out to all the NBC6 folks about their new NBC Miami site. A note: NBC Miami was pushed back one day, and is now set to launch March 17th.
“Hi,
We are writing to let you know about some great news!
www.NBC6.net is getting rebuilt from the ground up with an entirely new infrastructure, design, content plan, and more, including a new name and url: www.NBCMiami.com. We expect to launch NBC Miami on March 17, 2009.
In the meantime, you can take a quick tour of some of the great new features we have built out for you here. We’ve been working on our new site and hope that it will provide you with a richer experience and connect you closer to your local community.
Everything you love about NBC6.net will be on the new site along with much more, but things will shift to new places on the site so make sure you try our new search function (that works!) to give you what you want, how you want it. Also, during this transition you won’t be receiving our daily newsletter because our email service will be down for a week to make way for our new sites. But, don’t worry, we’ll be up and running on March 23, 2009.”
Let’s hope they have integrated more video features then previous O&O sites. Launch date is only 6 days away!
/thanks, e-mail tipster/
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