No one in the television industry heard of ivi TV last week. Now it’s all over the trades. The Seattle TV hijacker made a big deal out of offering network TV shows on the Internet for $4.99 a month. Except for ivi forgot to negotiate rights for network TV shows.

In early August of 2005, I put the wraps on a career in television broadcast engineering that stretched back just short of 37 years and decided to try on another hat to see how well it fit.

Everyone knows the jury’s still out on 3DTV. Nielsen’s latest scrutiny into the realm yielded a sort of shrug. Folks can’t text in shutter glasses, at least until someone comes up with 2D/3D bifocals. Which they will on the march to glasses-free 3DTV. In the meantime, the mobile media community will come to own 3D.

There we were, my roommate and I, casting about for a big payday, like you do when you’re an unemployed bilingual super model with a grad degree from Pepperdine or a trade hack disabused of all notions of nobly upholding that amendment.

The reality is, fewer people are being asked to do more and more work for no more pay. The quality of that work is bound to be affected, though there seems to prevail an executive-level assumption that audiences won’t notice. As if consumers of news won’t pick up on cut corners. That they’ll completely buy into the marketspeak about being served.