It’s no secret change is afoot in Media & Entertainment Industry production workflows.  The lineup of single-purpose products that formed the building blocks of an integrated technology solution are being replaced rapidly by COTS computers and networks as well as the cloud. 

In this Q&A with TVTech Contributing Editor Phil Kurz, Matrox Video Product Marketing Manager Angus Mackay discusses this “IT-ification” of the industry and how his company is helping organizations with these changes. Mackay also looks ahead to the 2024 NAB Show, April 13-17, in Las Vegas (Booth SL5073) and discusses what to expect from the company at the annual gathering.

About Matrox Video

Matrox Video is a global leader in video technology. Featuring a complete portfolio of best-in-class hardware, software, APIs, and SDKs, Matrox Video enables OEMs, system integrators, value-added channel partners, and end users to push the boundaries of video innovation. Serving the AV/IT, broadcast, and emerging markets for over 45 years, Matrox Video is synonymous with quality, performance, interoperability, and support. Matrox Video’s legal entity is Matrox Graphics Inc., part of the Matrox Group. More information is available at the company website. 

Given the effect and pervasiveness of IT in our personal and professional lives, it is encouraging to see that the media and entertainment industry’s transition to All-IP has steadily gathered pace. IP is an enabling technology and our industry’s adapting its use to our needs, responding to a number of challenges across contribution, live production and playout that we see today.

Consider the hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of pieces of equipment that are used by broadcasters worldwide. Then, offset that against other operators who are developing the use of IT protocols, interfaces and infrastructure—and therefore utilizing the maturity of perhaps a trillion pieces of equipment—and you can see there are better economies of scale that exist elsewhere. By moving away from broadcast-industry-specific architectures towards IP-based infrastructure and solutions, the media and entertainment industry can become more agile in their operations.

In other words, the reasons to migrate are compelling and have gone beyond applications such as OTT or real-time internet video delivery, and are now permeating across mission-critical use cases at fledgling start-ups and major international broadcasters.

For many, the catalyst has been the demand from consumers for content everywhere, which has ramped up increasingly in the last 10 years as we move towards a mobile-first environment. Bringing new OTT services to market has been a natural fit for IP transformation. Launching a new service on a software- and IP-centric infrastructure, supported by the cloud and microservices, now means a lead time measured in weeks and months and not years, as would be the case in the legacy world.

FLEXIBILITY AND ELASTICITY

In the application-specific integrated circuit history of broadcast technologies, when capacity is reached, it requires a major CAPEX expenditure and significant hardware upgrade. In a software and IP-centric world, capacity, performance and connectivity can all scale quickly, based on demand and then contract if required. This flexibility and elasticity matches the current commercial imperatives that broadcasters face when expanding their content reach, while at the same time, helps to build new revenue models that take advantage of IP-compatible concepts such as targeted and dynamic advertising and OTT-based subscription models.

At the closest edge of the wave, real innovators are adopting fully software-defined media workflows. This starts at the production level from studio cameras, to editing suites and progresses through content processing and distribution. The rationale is simple. Creating, managing and distributing content across a real-time, IP-based workflow with software as the controlling entity is much easier than the myriad transitional steps that are limited by custom-built hardware solutions. Today’s broadcasters can handle more content across a wider range of distribution paths with fewer staff than ever before.

Capacity and resiliency is assured through the ability to spin up more virtualized capacity—not just across media processing but for critical connectivity requirements through network function virtualizations. The transition to All-IP has also gone beyond arcane technical requirements. According to the highly regarded Devoncroft 2019 Big Broadcast Survey (BBS), IP networking and content delivery is the top-ranked trend this year—overtaking multiplatform content, which has ranked as “the most commercially important trend to the global broadcast and media industry” for the last decade.

EMERGING STANDARDS

Although closely linked, the move to All-IP has been accelerated by the emergence of several industry standards that have concentrated the minds of key broadcasters and provided a viable route for adoption that overcomes the inherent risk aversion of the industry. The arrival of Society of Motion Picture Television Engineers (SMPTE) ST 2110 Professional Media Over Managed IP Networks suite of standards and SMPTE ST 2059 Broadcast Profile for IEEE Precision Time Protocol standards specify the carriage, synchronization and description of the spate of real-time delivery of elementary essence streams over IP. This is for the purpose of live production and encompasses video, audio, timecode, sync and ancillary data. Media and entertainment’s future lies in technology stacks, where the enormous amounts of data can be stored in the cloud. Through standards such as SMPTE ST 2110 and ST 2059, broadcasters now have not only a standardized route towards replacing serial digital interface (SDI) with IP, but also the opportunity to usher in a new wave of applications based on, and leveraged off, IT protocols and infrastructure.

For broadcasters, a key advantage is no longer requiring two separate operations (staffing and infrastructure) for managing intra-facility traffic—SDI switches for professional media and IP/Ethernet switches for general data. Instead, facilities can rely on one common data center infrastructure. Alongside SMPTE standards, AMWA Networked Media Open Specifications (NMOS) define IP-based media network control and management, such as Discovery & Registration, Device Connection Management, Network Control and Interoperable Security. The transition to All-IP for the media and entertainment industry was envisioned and championed by the Joint Task Force on Networked Media (JT-NM), which is comprised of four major industry organizations: Advanced Media Workflow Association (AMWA), European Broadcasting Union (EBU), SMPTE and Video Services Forum (VSF).

As more vendors support these and other standards and specifications, the rate of customer adoption grows in tandem, leading to a virtuous circle which will help to alleviate one of the major obstacles in the way of All-IP transition—skills shortage. This is not insurmountable, and the broadcast industry has a good track record of attracting the best and the brightest—and the move to All-IP will hopefully mirror earlier technology shifts such as the move from analog to SDI in the late 1980’s.

SUMMARY

An All-IP broadcaster is no longer prefixed by the word “future”—it is a reality for the here and now. As legacy hardware reaches end-of-life, and as on-premises data centers run out of capacity, the logical upgrade path will be a move toward All-IP infrastructure and protocols, software defined media processing, virtualization and cloud-native solutions. The transition happening in the broadcast space in many ways mirrors the shift that telecoms providers and financial services organizations have embraced over the last decade, while the combination of commercial drivers and standards-based technologies is making the transition a far more orderly progression for the media and entertainment industry.

For those broadcasters just starting out on the journey, the ability to move through a hybrid adoption process—shifting discreet processes over to All-IP in a staged fashion—is also a compelling option, as is the use of Software-as-a-Service to limit the technical transition to more of a commercial decision. Over the next decade, the notion of a non-IP workflow will stand out as the exception and not the rule. By enabling production and content delivery providers to reduce time-to-market and benefit from more agile development environments, the realization of All-IP will provide the foundation for the media industry’s long-term future.

Matthew Goldman is the senior vice president of technology for MediaKind.

Glenn Reitmeier, former senior vice president, Technology Standards and Policy, at NBCU, sees his long career in R&D with Sarnoff Labs and senior technology positions at NBC Universal as a prelude to the next phase of his professional life.

Taking the technology, business—and even legal, in the sense of working closely with lawyers—experience he has amassed over his more than 40-year career, Reitmeier has formed GlennReitmeierTV, a consultancy devoted to helping those who call the shots in the industry navigate their way to success.

In this, the second of TVTechnology’s two-part interview with Reitmeier, the tech visionary talks about the highlights of his time in R&D at Sarnoff and at NBCU, lessons he learned along the way, the future prospects for television and how the tension between traditional broadcast engineering and the onslaught of IT tech and specialists will likely play out and a future in which transition is the order of the day.

(An edited transcript.)

TVTechnology:When you look back at your career it seems like, generally speaking, the first half was devoted to R&D and the second half was spent as a broadcaster. How would you compare the two? And did you ever find yourself at NBCU thinking, “I wish I would have had this or that insight when I was involved in this or that R&D project?” If so, can you give me an example?

Glenn Reitmeier: It might seem like I had two very different careers, but they were more similar than you might expect. If you think about a “technology maturity spectrum” as a left-to-right progression of R&D, advanced development, product design, product manufacturing and user application of products, my Sarnoff and NBCU roles would appear to be as far apart as you can get. But if you take that straight line and wrap it around in a circle, then R&D and user applications become adjacent, and it’s a small step between the two.

How can that make any sense? Well, at Sarnoff we started with technology experts from many different disciplines, and we attempted to come up with R&D projects that would create commercial value—think of that as a “technology push.”

In my role as a technology leader at NBCU, I was able to start with an understanding of our business challenges and attempted to identify technologies and drive the creation of standards that would provide solutions. Think of that as a “technology pull.” So, in both roles I was always trying to “connect the dots” between business needs and technology solutions.

In our Sarnoff R&D efforts, we had to rely on our project sponsors and partners to help provide the deep business insights and context that we lacked. For example, in the Advanced Digital HDTV effort, having NBC’s insights as a broadcaster combined with Thomson and Philips insights as TV manufacturers was extremely powerful. But I have learned that it’s extremely difficult to get business leaders and technologists to collaborate productively. They often have very different perspectives and “speak different languages” that need a translator. Now add lawyers to the mix and there is another whole set of perspectives and vocabulary. The ability to be conversant in the business, legal and technology domains and to “connect the dots” among them is where I hope to create value in my consultancy.

An example of an insight that I wish I had during the Grand Alliance effort is the importance of audience measurement. It was assumed that however audience measurement worked in analog, it would work in digital. In retrospect, maybe we could have done some things that would have advanced the art of audience measurement and commercial relevance in ATSC 1.

TVT:How long will broadcast TV remain viable?

GR: The answer is it’s all up to the broadcasters and the business leaders. If the broadcasters have the commitment to be technology leaders and they continue to innovate and provide valuable services, the services may change and morph, but broadcasting TV as an industry has the opportunity to survive and prosper. If you find yourself painted in a technological corner, if you are at a dead end, or you fail to innovate, then you are in big trouble. I think it is all about vision and leadership.

TVT:How do you see the back-and-forth between broadcast engineers and IT specialists ultimately playing out at stations, groups and networks?

GR: I think in the short-term, it will take a lot of dedicated teamwork. I don’t think we can, nor would we, escape the IT transformation and IP infrastructure changes that are coming over the industry. Short and medium term, teamwork, collaboration and bringing multiple skills to bear will be a necessity.

I think over the long-term, how we think about a broadcast engineer is going to change, and I think there is going to be a little bit of a subset of the IT world that has to deal with real-time signals and real-time computational performance. I think, not just for broadcasting, but for other applications of video, audio and media or lots of things, I think the IT world will become more real-time sensitive.

TVT:What do you see as your top technical contributions during your 25 years at Sarnoff, rising from an entry-level research associate to VP, HDTV and Multimedia Systems?

GR: Early in my career, I was fortunate to play an important role in establishing the ITU-R BT.601 Component Digital Video standard, which was the basis for the SMPTE 259 Serial Digital Interface standard that became ubiquitous and made digital production and broadcast facilities a practical reality. For broadcast equipment, I worked on TV special effects algorithms, the D1 and D5 VTR tape formats and associated error correction and concealment. I worked on digital ICs that miniaturized camera timing and signal generation. For consumer electronics, my team pioneered the use of on-screen display graphics and left-right-up-down/select button navigation for TVs.

We were working on a precursor to the internet in the late 1980s, developing advanced dial-up modems and wavelet-based image compression. That led me to the “crazy” idea that an all-digital TV system might be possible and a skunks-works project that eventually became the Advanced Digital HDTV proposal. Its core concepts of a layered digital system architecture, a packet data transport for service flexibility and support for multiple video formats eventually became core elements of the Grand Alliance system and ATSC 1.0. I’m very gratified that my work at Sarnoff resulted in over 50 patents.

TVT:What about the highlights of your 17 years at NBCU as VP, Advanced Technology, and SVP, Technology Standards and Policy?

GR: At NBCU, I contributed to launching Universal-HD—NBCU’s first HD cable channel—and Weather+, the first national broadcast multicast channel, the first use of real-time video fingerprinting to combat piracy for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the development of subscriber authentication for TV Everywhere access to the 2010 Vancouver Olympics and the 8K-video-over-Internet2 demonstration for the 2012 London Olympics that we did in collaboration with NHK and BBC. And, of course, a lot of effort went into ATSC 3.0 and to establishing A3SA, the ATSC 3.0 Security Authority.

TVT:Any parting thoughts?

GR: The technology changes that have taken place over the course of my career never cease to astound me. While I’m proud of the contributions I have made, I am extremely grateful for the many talented colleagues that I have had the pleasure to collaborate with over the years.

One final observation. Both time and technology advance relentlessly. The incredible longevity of the analog NTSC standard led many industry leaders to believe that the ATSC 1 standard would similarly last for more than 50 years.

They thought that they just had to endure a single transition, and then technology would remain stable. As we have seen in the span of ATSC 1.0 and ATSC 3.0, the pace technology advances is too fast for that model. There will certainly be an ATSC 3.1, 3.2 and eventually a 4.0 and beyond.

So, to the contrary: If you aren’t moving forward, you are falling behind. In an environment of rapidly changing technology, a constant state of technology transition is the new normal. Simply put: If you’re not in transition, you’re in trouble.

More information about GlennReitmeierTV is available online.

Read the first part of the TVT's interview with Glenn Reitmeier.

For a comprehensive source of TV Technology’s ATSC 3.0 coverage, see ourATSC3 silo. 

LAS VEGAS—Bleeding-edge tech and issues will be front-and-center at this year’s Broadcast Engineering and Information Technology Conference (BEITC) at the 2019 NAB Show. This year’s conference runs April 6-11 at the Las Vegas Convention Center in the North Hall meeting rooms.

“The focus of the 2019 BEITC is, as always, the latest and most authoritative technical presentations of broadcast and related media technologies, from experts in their respective fields,” said Skip Pizzi, vice president of technology education and outreach for NAB. “Presentations will cover radio and television broadcasting technology, both on-air and online, including core audio, video and RF engineering topics as well as IT-related supportive elements.”

Big Topics this year include ATSC 3.0, artificial intelligence, IP-based facilities and SMPTE ST 2110/AES67, according to Pizzi. “The industry seems to be moving to calling this ‘professional media networking,’ so we are following suit—5G, big data, OTT, cybersecurity and content protection,” he said. “I hope delegates will come away having deepened their understanding of technologies critical to their personal skill sets and their employers’ operations, and ideally also learned a few brand new things.”

Given the wealth of compelling presentations scheduled for BEITC 2019, it wasn’t easy for Pizzi to choose some to recommend to TV Technology readers. The five below are by no means the only must-attend sessions at this year’s BEITC, but they do belong on this list.

TRANSITION TO ATSC 3.0

To address broadcasters’ questions about the transition to ATSC 3.0, the NAB and partnering broadcasters have created the “ATSC 3.0 Station Transition Guidelines Manual.” The details of the new manual will be explored during “Transitioning Television Markets to Next Gen TV is a Team Sport,” April 7. 3:20-3:40 p.m.

“The manual provides relevant information to all those involved with broadcast stations, large and small, in how a coordinated market transition may be implemented from the current ATSC-1 broadcast standard to the Next Gen TV platform or ATSC 3.0,” said Jeff Andrew, director of broadcast communications for Osborn Engineering, who along with NAB Senior Vice President of Technology Lynn Claudy will speak at the conference. “This session is for all broadcast executives and engineers who want to learn more about how to make ATSC 3.0 part of their stations’ business.”

The new manual is being unveiled at a crucial time for U.S. TV broadcasters. Unlike the move from NTSC to ATSC-1, “the conversion to ATSC 3.0 is especially challenging since there will be no additional interim TV channel made available by the FCC during the transition,” said Andrew. “Most stations will have to coordinate within their particular markets with other stations in order to form channel-sharing agreements to be able to provide legacy ATSC 1 programming and the new Next Gen TV services. In most television markets, cooperation between stations, commercial and non-commercial, with be key in order to have a successful market transitions to ATSC 3.0.

“Hopefully most of their questions will be answered on how to get started, including formulating the budgets required to convert [repacking and non-repacking], and the new Next Gen equipment needed to be acquired for your plant in order to broadcast ATSC 3.0, plus ways to coordinate with station managers and engineers in your markets to work together on the transition to Next Gen TV in a timely manner.”

REPACK: THE 1 WTC EXPERIENCE

With broadcasters now in Phase 2 of the channel repack, BEITC attendees can learn how it was accomplished in the nation’s largest media market at “No More Broadcaster Silos: Lessons on the Repack from Phases 1 and 2,” Sunday April 7, 3:40-4:40 p.m. in N256.

“We start with a repack case study of the transmission center at 1 World Trade Center in New York, which services seven broadcasters in the most densely populated geography of any RF site in the U.S.,” said moderator and broadcast marketing consultant Josh Gordon. “The date of this session will be four days from the completion of the repack's Phase 2 which, unlike Phase 1, will include stations in heavily populated areas.”

Panelists include John Lyons, assistant vice president at the Durst Organization and Director of Broadcast Operations at 1 World Trade Center; Doug Lung, vice president of Broadcast Technology at NBC/Telemundo stations and long-time TV Technology columnist; Nick Wymant, CTO at RFS Systems; and Stephen Kolvek, CTO at MYAT, Inc.

One of the issues up for discussion will include repack-linked stations, according to Gordon. “Doug Lung and John Lyons first realized the extent of this issue when formulating test plans for the post-repack facility at 1 World Trade Center,” Gordon said. “As a broadcaster moves to its new repack frequency, it becomes ‘linked’ to the station that currently occupies that frequency. Before a station can move to its new channel, stations on that channel have to move to their new channel, which in many cases is occupied by another station that has to move to a new channel and so on. The presentation will trace how the linked chain of stations that must move before WCBS-TV in New York City can move extends as far as Ohio and Ontario.”

Wymant and Kolvek, whose companies were involved with the 1 World Trade Center build, will add perspective on the state of repack building services nationwide, Gordon added. “We anticipate discussing other issues that will come up during Phase 2.”

APPLICATION TELEVISION

With ATSC 3.0, broadcasters will be able to offer apps for their viewers to consume live and VOD content via over-the-top (OTT) streaming services. This change will plunge broadcasters into “The Brave New World of Application Television,” a BEITC 2019 session hosted by Jim DeChant, vice president of Technology for News-Press & Gazette Broadcasting, April 7, 2:30-2:50 p.m. in Rm. N256.

"My presentation will explore ATSC 3.0 mechanisms for signalling and replacing content, methods for defining clip order, interfacing with content decision engines and the use of media cache to facilitate dynamic content replacement in an application based display system,” DeChant said. “Advanced signalling techniques offer new ways to provide a ‘broadcast quality' streaming experience featuring UHD video, immersive audio and a customized user content via a process known as ‘Dynamic Content Replacement.’"

DeChant will assess the value of broadband routers, storage devices and ATSC 3.0-capable consumer receivers for handling Application Television. The need for common mezzanine formats, media identifiers, content security and new technologies like Common Media Application Format will also be discussed. "These systems will bring a new content ecosystem to our homes, cars and businesses improving the media experience through dynamic content replacement," he said.

DELIVERING UHD HDR CONTENT

With the 2018 FIFA World Cup and Winter Olympics delivered in UHD HDR, the demand for the ultra hi-res standard is on the upswing worldwide. Although the signals were transmitted over a variety of cable TV, DTH, IPTV, terrestrial and OTT platforms using HDR10/PQ10 and HLG10 standards, for many broadcasters and content providers, UHD HDR remains a “black box,”—they know what it is, but are not quite sure what how it works.

“Demystifying Live UHD HDR Service Delivery” will reveal what’s inside the black box. The session, held April 10, 10:40-11:00 a.m. in Rm. N260 is hosted by Thierry Fautier, Harmonic's vice president of video strategy and president of the Ultra HD Forum.

“I will examine all of the different deployment scenarios and analyze the rationale for picking a specific HDR solution," said Fautier. "Additionally, I'll discuss some of the UHD HDR delivery challenges and recent technology innovations that are enhancing UHD HDR experiences."

Fautier will also tackle the topic of backwards compatibility and provide insights on how operators are deploying live HDR. "Beyond shedding light on some of the inherent challenges of delivering UHD HDR, I'll look at how the current HDR experience can be improved using advanced techniques, such as dynamic mapping while still being backward compatible with an installed base of existing HDR receivers," he said.

USING BLOCKCHAIN IN MEDIA PRODUCTION

IP-connected data lives in an insecure cyberspace constantly beset by hackers and other security threats. Blockchain is an IT architecture that stands up against such threats by creating a “distributed ledger” across a distributed, peer-to-peer network that resists data modification by outsiders, while accepting ongoing updates and growth of the records.

Also referred to as a form of online “crypto-currency,” blockchain can also be deployed as a centralized, secure platform for managing all of the revenues, records and expenses associated with producing content. Groupe Média TFO Vice-President and COO Éric Minoli will explain how this can be accomplished in “Blockchain - An Opportunity to Refine Intellectual Property Management,"April 10, 11:40 a.m.-noon in Rm. N258.

“Alongside the creative challenge of producing and distributing great video content internationally, there is a huge administrative burden,” said Minoli. “At Groupe Média TFO, we have developed a prototype platform which uses blockchain to create a completely fresh approach to managing all these relationships and identifying practical savings in administration.” This blockchain-based platform is designed to work during the production process and afterwards “when continuing payments are still contractual obligations but the production company may no longer have the resources available to complete them,” he said. “Indeed, it may not exist at all.”

Groupe Média TFO’s blockchain prototype has been tested in Canada and in France, and is available for use by other media groups.

For more information on the Broadcast Engineering and Information Technology Conference, visit theBEITChomepage.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. — Arthur C. Clarke

Sometimes the news is so big, a guy has to stop what he’s doing and write an article for his favorite technology magazine. Such an event happened the other day with Intel’s announcement of the Neural Compute Stick 2. It’s a full capability artificial intelligence and vision processing device in a USB stick. I’m a pragmatic guy who is always thinking about what will be in the future, but with this announcement, the future’s arriving a little sooner than I had planned. It’s time to think about the impact on the broadcast industry and what we can prototype, RIGHT NOW.

To be sure, AI of this horsepower, about 4 teraflops/second (which I am guessing is smarter than a mosquito, but not as intelligent as a flounder), has been with us for a while and has been available through the cloud (think Amazon Alexa or Siri). This isn’t even Intel’s first neural network stick. But the addition of vision processing with this level of capability and without an internet connection means it can be used in real-time applications. And at just $99 each, every device will soon have the capabilities of being “smart.”

So what will this change? The short answer is ... just about everything. But readers of this article want to know how this will affect TV production and consumption. So here are some predictions:

Smart Brilliant TVs Will Know Us.

It won’t take long for the CES guys to pick up on this. Finding the right content to watch is hard and getting harder. I’ve observed for a while that trying to find a good film to watch across your cable, Netflix and HBO subscriptions is futile. The next step is for TVs to know exactly who is in the room and to recommend choices for us. Perhaps the television has a personality and participates in the debate. The set will get real-time feedback on the choices from all of us based upon our body language — improving the accuracy of recommendations over time. Whoever owns this algorithm is going to have a lot of influence. AI in the set can put this power back in the CE manufacturers’ laps.

Cameras Will See Things We Don’t

All the way on the other end of the signal path, cameras will get a lot smarter. Remember those old analog “skin tone color correction” circuits to smooth out wrinkles? Well, of course they went digital years ago, but what happens when they’re smart and driven by a neural network? Live de-aging correction is possible. Barbara Walters would be soooo jealous. It does not take much imagination to see that live replacement of an actor’s image with an avatar would open new doors for the effects industry to work their magic in live, more interactive ways.

Without a doubt, autofocus will now be able to anticipate the subject. Pan, tilt and zoom controls will follow the action and frame automatically, perhaps even mimicking a particular cinematographer’s style. It’s not a leap to say that robotic cameras will soon become self-driving. Ross, Vitec? Are you paying attention?

Compression

There’s no doubt these cost-effective, local, massively parallel processors will be used to create new compression algorithms. With computer vision, we can dedicate bits to only the most important parts of the image and create an architecture totally different than what we use now. I wonder who will do it first, how much latency there will be, and whether we’ll still owe royalties to MPEG-LA.

A Helpful Hand In Editing

Editing is akin to storytelling and therefore a creative art — but AI can help by organizing clips automatically based upon who is in them and create automated logs. The user interface may change to support gestures and voice control (no more carpal tunnel or backaches!). Perhaps the editing device itself might even learn the style of the editor and begin a rough-cut on their behalf.

Real-Time Automated Captioning

Silicon-based captioning solutions have been making steady progress in reaching the accuracy levels of their carbon-based competitors for prerecorded files. With localized AI, real-time live closed-captioning with acceptable accuracy should be a slam dunk. While we’re at it, let’s use the video recognition to automate VDS (Video Descriptive Service). Heck, all of this could move into the set-top box or even the TV for use on demand, and spare the broadcaster the cost of doing it at all. Let’s go one step further and add real-time translation into any language, executed in the TV, at the request of the viewer.

I’m Sorry, Dave, I’m Afraid I Can’t Do That

This exciting news is especially fitting on the week when Douglas Rain passed away. For those who did not catch the news, Rain played the voice of HAL 9000, the sinister AI computer in “2001 a Space Odyssey,” as well as a much more helpful sidekick in “2010: The Year We Make Contact.” So in one lifetime, we’ve gone from imagining pervasive artificial intelligence to making it available for under $100. Arthur C. Clarke would sum it up nicely, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

[Want more information like this? Subscribe to our newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox.]