CES will feature things
never heard of again,
except for “Ultra HD,”
which will be held up
as the greatest advance
in television technology ever imagined
until…
Japan’s NHK contingent, instead of
appearing in person at the NAB Show in
April, will attend the show holographically.
Meanwhile, Comcast and Verizon will
merge and hire as counsel the humorist
Dave Barry, who will employ his hallowed
“neener, neener” technique with regulators,
because there won’t be a darn thing they
can do about it. The two companies will
nonetheless vow to shed some holdings
and temporarily make resources available
to competitors in order to appease the
Justice Department. Consequently, Verizon
will get rid of 2 MHz of AM radio spectrum
it had laying around, and Tennis Channel
will temporarily swap places with NBC
across Comcast and FiOS systems.
In other developments, retransmission
fights will become so fierce in the absence
of election revenue that members of
Congress will issue statements. At the peak
of the unrest, several will sign a strongly
worded letter to FCC Chairman Julius
Genachowski instructing him to “look
into it.” He will respond that he’s “got this
thing,” as the negotiating leverage of TV
stations will be significantly reduced by the
spectrum incentive auction.
Simultaneously, Sinclair Broadcast
Group chief David Smith, having amassed
every small- and mid-market TV station
in the country, will start wearing t-shirts
proclaiming, “Bring It!”
Elsewhere, Apple will introduce the
iWall, an iPhone-like “Ultra” TV set with
both swipe and Siri-commanded channel
changing, whereby the top-rated network
in the country will become “surfing.” It
will be hailed as the greatest advance in
television technology ever imagined until
which time NHK introduces a telepathic
TV that allows people to project their very
thoughts on a screen. In a disturbingly
large number of instances, it will be
virtually indistinguishable from analog
static. @_@