We recently did a “25 More Things to Know About ATSC 3.0” webinar that I’m reproducing here in rap lyrics:

South Korea went live at 5, May 31 at dawn. “Next-Gen TV” is the name 3.0 is taking on.

At NAB, 3.0 was a “Hub” with a shiny, red Ferrari, and a live signal from Black Mountain—a 3.0 safari! (I’m truly sorry.)

Then came June 8, when replies were due at the FCC, about launching 3.0 and the wonders of Next-Gen TV!

The nature of the standard is a whole of many parts, with infinite capabilities and a bootstrap for a heart.

Inside there is a future clause that makes 6 MHz a pipe that carries up to 57 Mbps of almost any type!

So a 3.0 signal coursing through the air can send many things to make just one, or one thing everywhere.

Sound, we know, is a major part of 3.0—it’s multilingual, polyglot immersive audi-o.

There’s captioning and subtitles for those who need to see, and cypher-like encryption to battle piracy.

Survey says: Consumers want what 3.0 will do and they’ll pay more for it, too!

That’s good news for Korea’s LG, which is adding 3.0 receiver chips to Ultra HDTVs.

For emergencies, AWARN creates advanced alerts, that target folks in danger to keep them from getting hurt.

Even now, a few stations are doing a 3.0 broadcast, with the idea of transitioning by simulcast.

The time to switch is now with the repack underway, and lots of new revenue streams, market analysts say.

Sinclair, meanwhile, is “Mobile First,” and going into cars, because 3.0 lets many transmitters send the signal far.

Vendors are making hybrid gear that handles 3.0. Antenna patterns also are important things to know.

Watermarks will trigger interactivity, and a 3.0 consortium has formed for “Next-Gen. TV.”

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s intention to re-reclassify broadband as an information service rather than a utility is not going so well. The net neutrality camp is going ballistic. The FCC’s docket to roll back the reclassification had more than 1.6 million comments within 19 days of opening, spurred ostensibly by a screed delivered by a late-night TV host, HBO’s John Oliver.

During what may have been a cathartic lapse in judgment, the chairman decided to read his own “mean tweets,” about network neutrality, like a celebrity reading insults on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” The problem is, the chairman is not a celebrity on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” He’s a public official mocking private citizens.

What can possibly go wrong with that? After all, despite the most valiant efforts of our first-grade teachers, mocking is now the currency of our national discourse.

Be that as it may, many people consider network neutrality along the lines of a civil right, where internet service providers are not allowed to control the flow of content the way Google, Facebook and Macedonian hackers do, for example.

But Chairman Pai is about deregulation. The argument for deregulation here is the same as it is in all instances—investment. You put too many conditions on a business and no one will invest in it. Broadband is beheld as an antidote to a sluggish economy, especially in areas abandoned by manufacturing, because people who work with their hands will naturally gravitate toward coding. So, from a doctrinaire perspective, ISPs must be supported at all costs (unless they are municipalities trying to support local school districts and fire departments).

Regardless of whether or not network neutrality makes any technical sense, is beside the point. The mere fact that such a thing exists screams to the paucity of options, and no matter what the FCC does, the price of middling broadband will continue to escalate.

“The power’s off.” “Is it off everywhere?”

We look over the valley floor. A few houses have generators. Most are dark. The wind is howling. The redwood table is floating in the pool and the roof is trying to lift off. The main road is closed because someone’s roof did lift off and hurtled through a transformer.

“Do you have a transistor radio?”

“I have this weather radio. It probably needs new batteries.”

“I don’t think we need a weather radio. It’s windier than the inside of a turbine. We need to check the local news if we want to see where the flying roof went. I don’t suppose you have a battery-powered TV?”

“Well, as a matter of fact…”

We didn’t need it. The power came back on that night. Some poor souls were out there in bucket trucks handling electrified cables so we could keep our beer cold.

It doesn’t always work out that way, as every cattle rancher in the heartland knows full well. We just lost power for a while. They lost a million acres, thousands of head and several comrades.

I don’t know if AWARN’s advanced alerting technology could have averted those casualties, but it arguably does have the potential to save lives. AWARN aggregates information from across multiple first-responder agencies and delivers it in real time—something first responders themselves did not have on 9/11.

AWARN, for “Advanced Warning and Response Network,” is the emergency alert system overlay of ATSC 3.0, the proposed new transmission methodology for broadcast TV signals. We’ve heard about the platform’s “rich media” capabilities for awhile, but it’s the cross-agency aggregation with live TV coverage that commands attention, plus the ability to target and reach those most affected.

AWARN is able to achieve these things, we’re told.

Even when the power is off.

TV Technology has evolved a lot in 34 years, but one thing that remains constant is that the franchise is a discussion platform for its constituency, which now faces a multilevel optimization problem inside of a cipher on a deadline.

As many as 1,200 or more TV broadcast signals in a cat’s cradle of 7,950 will move to new channels and/or sharing arrangements while calculating the immediate or future deployment of a new, non-backward compatible transmission technology in the form of ATSC 3.0 while seeking revenue models à la “Twilight Zone” meets whack-a-mole—all within roughly a three-year timeframe.

This is a crossroads, whereas the digital transition was a threshold. The station landscape remained pretty much operationally uniform after the digital transition. The post-auction ecosystem will have unprecedented disparity of service models.

Some stations will share a 6 MHz channel, forfeiting the full potential of advanced video and audio technologies. We’ll have a 4:3, 480i spaghetti western rotation on one channel and the interactive, voice-responsive, virtual-reality bowl on another.

Also, not all of those 7,950 licensees will exist. We’ll have large station groups forming de facto networks and a few “boutique” broadcasters and stalwart outliers like WRAL.

This does not even begin to include the perpetual technological challenges of keeping track of metadata and versioning content for the next must-have display device that goes away before it catches on.

Amid the chaos, technology vendors and broadcasters alike are inventing and reinventing on the fly in an increasingly virtualized environment. Collaborative discourse is imperative to make it all work.

TV Technology strives to support and sustain the industry discourse that will help its constituency navigate the repack, ATSC 3.0, virtualization, new service models and regulatory bouncing balls, all while keeping the lights on and the signals live.

We welcome your continued participation in the conversation.

WHEREFORE, ART THOU—I posted a meme on Facebook a while back—a cross-stitch saying, “Journalism. It’s a tough job with insane pressure and pretty crappy pay. On the other hand, everybody hates you.”

I think folks in the field ranging from unpaid interns to multimillion-dollar salary types have felt that shade, lately. When your profession is more reviled than “Wall Street investment banker,” you need crisis PR, which, of course, you cannot afford. So you expound on the difference between news and opinion, even if it’s like taking a squirt gun to a wildfire.

You do everything you can not to make mistakes, but you do because there is no longer a copy desk and a phalanx of editors making your life a living hell by insisting that you check something for the thousandth time! If you’re a TV journalist, you’re also your own camera operator and editor.

So you own your mistakes, but in doing so, risk your credibility because why should anyone believe someone who makes mistakes? Six-hundred so-called “news” outlets just ran with your mistake if you happen to be reporting on something of interest to the average American, or you’ve managed to fit “Spam,” “tourniquet” “Tom Brady” and the pope into a teaser.

What is lost in the din is that journalists live in and serve communities. In December 2016, alone, local broadcast journalists helped raise $23.6 million for children’s medical care, food banks, the disabled, wildfire victims, families in need, the homeless, Make-A-Wish grants, World War II veterans and injured service members’ families.

They delivered thousands of articles of clothing and toys, plus tons of food to those in need. They ran educational campaigns on bullying and hosted public discussions among police and African-American community members. They exposed heroin abuse, helped traumatized military veterans obtain treatment and promoted a reading challenge at the local library.

“And that’s,” a prominent journalist once said, “the way it is.”

That was fast. Here we are with 2016 in the rearview. I believe I speak for myself when I say, what in the blazes just happened?

Well, in January, amid the retina-frying sea of colossal TV screens that is the annual Consumer Gadget Extravaganza, Kodak inexplicably resurrected Super 8. Everyone got really excited and promptly forgot about it.

In February, Beyoncé led a march on the Super Bowl, leading NFL officials to seek a less controversial performer for the 2017 event in the form of a woman known to wear carpaccio. Meanwhile, Korea said it would launch ATSC 3.0 broadcasting in 2017 as the U.S. prepared to auction off public airwaves.

Drone sightings near airports escalated in March to the point where the Federal Aviation Administration sent out a stern press release.

In April, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said he’d circulate a petition for voluntary adoption of ATSC 3.0; then did so, and promptly forgot about it.

In May, Homer Simpson took questions from a live audience and told a woman who wanted to do nothing at work to “always wear glasses with eyes glued onto them.”

In June, broadcasters ask $86 billion for 126 MHz of TV spectrum.

South Korea adopted ATSC 3.0 in July, while 62 bidders lined up to buy $86 billion worth of TV spectrum in the United States.

In August, bidding stopped at $22.45 billion.

In September, the first broadcast antennas were installed on One World Trade Center. People never forgot and continue to care.

In October, broadcasters asked $54.6 million for 114 MHz that subsequently raised $21.5 billion after a single, two-hour round of bidding.

In November, teen-age Macedonian entrepreneurs created the fake news industry while some guys at MIT wrote an algorithm that makes videos from still shots.

In December, broadcasters asked $40.3 billion for 108 MHz because of a “spectrum crisis” everyone got excited about and promptly forgot.

Dear Cubs,
You have all gone home and are hopefully enjoying the bacon and cigarettes for breakfast you so richly deserve. Same to you guys in Cleveland. Have your favorite, whatever it is. America will pick up the tab. We owe you one.

You don’t know me. I’m not a regular sports fan. I don’t own a jersey with a number on it. I was even on local TV once years ago because I was in the library on home game day, studying. That is how I got where I am today.

On deadline.

So I thought I’d write and thank you. It may have taken you 108 years, but your timing was perfect—and not a moment too soon. Distracting us with sportsmanship, civility and history. I think more than a few of us were beginning to think those things had passed into an alternate reality, but there, in a stunning display of emotional maturity, Trevor Bauer applauds Jason Heyward’s flying-leap catch that gets him out.

And you guys, playing human-being ball, with goofy errors and magnificent moves, stretching it out to 10 innings in a seventh game. You made Bill Murray cry tears of joy. Bill Murray, to whom Hollywood has paid a great deal of money to affect an emotion, none of which involved magical unicorn tears of euphoria.

I read that 40 million people watched. I did.

It was a delight not to be yelled at for a change.

Sometimes our media seems to bring out the worst in us, or we in it, I’ve never quite put my finger on it but I am certainly open to study grants. There are an awful lot of things on TV these days that make me despair of my kind, but Game 7 was like breathing fresh air after being stuck in a funky tunnel for too long.

Please come back again real soon.

Your friend,
Deborah

TV is undergoing such rapid and massive changes, it’s impossible to predict an overall outcome, unless it’s simply an ongoing process of ever-accelerating change.

Only AI will be capable of keeping up with such a rapid transformation of technology, available now from youth to a generation defined by, and defining of, the Digital Age.

I, for one, welcome our Millennial overlords. They drove the liberation of music, voices and images from physical media and opened up a global conversation.

The last big shift like that was… what, from chiseling stone to writing on paper? Both are physical media, so… never?

Nothing has had a more radical impact, debatably on the world, but certainly on the media business, which amounts to a multibillion dollar global communications and content distribution trade route reaching nearly every human life form on earth, or at least in the lower 50.

Khumbu Icefall

I haven’t been to the land of ice and snow, so I don’t know, but maybe there, too. It’s astounding when you think about it. A single conjure and the Khumbu Icefall is right before my eyes thanks to somebody with a digital camera and the internet, and the entire generation of code writers in between.

The Virtual Reality Everest summit is coming to a headset near you, rest assured. It’s just a matter of time—and not that much time—that this experience will be carried on that trade route.

By whom, we don’t yet know, because the parties maintaining the route are evolving, and being evolved by, the Digital Age. Reliance on cable and wires is receding. The broadcast industry, its engineering community in particular, is functioning remarkably well in a blindfolded game of musical channel assignment.

Drones, meanwhile, are being dispatched by wireless providers to bring us each a bandwidth thoroughfare, wherever we may be.

Thus, one thing seems certain about this evolution. It will be delivered over the air.

I tried to stream a Disney cartoon last night in 1080p. Vudu said, “Not enough bandwidth.”

I tried HD.

“Nope.”

SD?

“Sorry.”

I pay $100 a month for broadband that increasingly does not stream media. I’m not alone. Fifteen thousand “Game of Thrones” fans were frozen out of HBO Now in June. This is notable when money is flooding into OTT.

We’ve been warned of “bandwidth bottleneck” for years, but advances in technology briefly kept up. No longer. Global internet traffic, according to the Aug. 10 issue of Nature, is growing at around 22 percent a year. Mobile demand, 53 percent.

That’s without everyone’s thermostat, refrigerator, automobile, home-security system and virtual-reality headset connected to it.

The problem is the “last mile” of mostly of copper and coax cables from an era before the internet, much less the one of “Things.” Cable and telco TV providers have done some fiber-to-the-premises, but deployments are targeted.

FTTP is “expensive and time-consuming,” Nature said. Even Google Fiber is looking at a 3.5 GHz wireless last mile, Telecompetitor said in February.

Meanwhile, 5G wireless technology—said to be 100 times faster than 4G—is on deck for a “limited commercial launch” by Verizon in 2017. The FCC also recently opened up frequencies above 28 GHz for 5G, and eliminated the “historic preservation review” for the smaller, more densely placed base stations that will transmit 5G at higher frequencies.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler called 5G “a national priority,” and Nature makes the case that there is no IoT without 5G.

The largest media companies are putting their money on streaming over an overburdened infrastructure. Delivery will shift to the platform most able to handle it, and that increasingly appears to be fiber-to-5G on frequencies much higher than that of the 100 MHz of “beachfront” TV spectrum on sale now for $88 billion.

OH, THE PLACES YOU'LL GO—Today’s press release of the day proclaimed, “Americans lose 377 days in a lifetime browsing for something to watch!”

“No way,” I thought. “Has to be twice that.”

Max and I spend more time looking for something to watch than watching something. We have Time Warner Cable on-demand, Netflix and Amazon Prime, not to mention all of those over-the-top options on a smart TV that no one ever uses because 377 days for Pete’s sake.

This is clearly an outrage, or as alert flack Mauricio Guitron phrased it, “a horrific, loathsome, and devastating problem afflicting living rooms across America.”

Mr. Guitron cited the “Rovi Multi-Region Survey,” which said Americans spend 19 minutes a day “browsing aimlessly for something to watch.” I don’t agree. We aim to find something when we browse. It goes like this:

“Push the ‘smart hub’ button.”

“I can’t see it… oh, there it is. It says, ‘no input.’”

“OK, turn the TV off and back on.”

“It’s not working.”

“You need the other remote. No, the other one.”

“OK, here we go. What do you want to watch?”

“Something not violent.”

“Let’s see… ‘Death Race,’ ‘Death Wish,’ ‘Death Tunnel,’ ‘Faces of Death,’ ‘Death Trap,’ ‘Dawn of the Dead,’ ‘Day of the Dead,’ ‘Night of the Dead,’ ‘The Dead of Night…’”

“Let’s see what’s on-demand.”

“What did I just do?”

“You have to use the other remote.”

“Where did it go?”

And so forth. A good five minutes lost looking for something to look for something to watch. Then there’s the tedious chore of either choosing individual letters with microscopic arrow keys, or in the case of TWC on-demand, scrolling through a list of a thousand unfamiliar titles.

This process is technically referred to as, “discovery.” If “discovery” doesn’t make a space-age leap in development soon, I predict that a new phenomenon will emerge in television—the little-known practice of “linear viewing.”

I just had a brief social media exchange about the economics of the Olympics. NBC surpassed $1.2 billion in ad sales the day before the opening ceremony, due in part, according to The Associated Press, to reports of Zika and the unsanitary conditions of Guanabara Bay. Brazil had seven years to contain 80 percent of the sewage flowing into the bay by the time of the Games.

This did not occur.

Brazil went 51 percent over budget instead, spending $4.58 billion on preparations and infrastructure for the Games, according to Statista. That’s a bargain, however, compared to the $21.89 billion borne by Russia for Sochi and representing a 289 percent cost overrun to produce a park with one McDonald’s and a lot of stray dogs.

This seems like a good time for a cost analysis of dedicated sites for the summer and winter games. Some place without a general plague of deadly mosquitoes, because the Olympics are important, and NBC’s haul reflects that as much if not more than the market value of America’s morbid curiosity. These games are a refuge from the wall-to-wall mudslinging that otherwise dominates our TV screens.

Young athletes from around the world at peak performance come together and compete against their peers. Some of them do things we never forget. Jesse Owens winning four gold medals in Berlin in 1936. Tiny little Nadia Comaneci’s perfect 10. The Jamaican bobsled team. Derek Redmond’s dad running out to help him cross the finish line after he tore a hamstring. People we probably never heard of before, from all cultures, languages and beliefs, doing amazing things, often against astounding odds, and sometimes rising above it all to be wholly, courageously human.

Let the Games continue and the cost-impact analyses begin.

CASCADES, FALL—Max was perfectly happy with his big screen Sony projection CRT the size of a fatted heifer before I came along.

“I like the soft picture,” he’d say. “It’s easy on my eyes.”

Max is a master artist and colorist by trade, so I didn’t doubt him.

I, on the other hand, have spent a good deal of my adult life staring into a glowing screen. The massive Sony had a three-inch strip of dying phosphors across the bottom. I imagined I could hear them screaming with my imaginary profoundly acute hearing. Max, who is also a mind-reader and a Broncos fan, casually mentioned that maybe it was time for a new TV shortly after Peyton Manning skooled Tom Brady.

Coincidentally, I got an email from Best Buy the next day. OK, I get emails from Best Buy every day because I almost bought something online from them once. But this email offered a 65-inch LG 4KTV for $999. So I tell Max I’ll get it for his birthday because I like him a lot and screaming phosphors. Being a proud man, Max was not about to let any girlfriend of his buy him a TV set without seeing if he could get a better deal.

So we took a field trip to our local Best Buy where they did not have the 65-inch LG 4KTV for $999 in stock. They had plenty of 65-inch 4KTVs for many, many more dollars, but not that one. We then asked our friendly Best Buy associate if he could order it for us.

“Hem. Haw,” he replied.

“Hmm,” we responded.

The next day, Max tried to order it online. Best Buy would not ship it to his business. Best Buy would not ship it to his house. Best Buy would not ship it to a mouse. Best Buy would not ship it here, or there or anywhere. Best Buy does not like green money in hand.

Max got a customer service rep on the phone.

“I have a FedEx account,” he said. “I’ll ship it myself.”

“We can’t do that.”

“I am a shareholder. I’m trying to give you money.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

This tactic, I am told, is called “the old bait and switch.”

I am not saying that Best Buy intentionally pulled “the old bait and switch.” I am saying the preceding true-life scenario was described to me thusly by two completely separate people, one of whom was not me.

In the meantime, since I had placed the pretend $999 LG 4KTV in my virtual Best Buy shopping cart, I kept getting email overtures that read like a Match.com mistake.

“!!!Big News,” said the first one, punctuated in Spanglish. “This has your name on it! Your cart has something in it!”

Then two days later, the less exclamatory, “Thanks for your interest, this has your name on it! We saved it for you...”

Five days in, they went passive-aggressive like an undershorts thief at camp.

“Uh oh, this has your name on it!”

And then finally, as if the previous series of emails never occurred and I hadn’t already discovered that the $999 LG 4KTV set was not available in or through any Best Buy store in all of California:

“You’re all set to check out at Best Buy.”

By this time, however, Max and I had gone to Costco where I let him do the talking. They had 65-inch Samsung 4KTV floor model that he got for pretty much the same price as the LG that Best Buy would not sell us unless we drove 3,000 miles to get it in Baltimore.

Aside from my own soupçon of niggling guilt about potentially setting off a chain of electronic upgrades across Max’s house, we both really like the new TV.

Thank you, Best Buy. Well played.

STARDATE, 010115—Once again, the new year was launched with a bevy of planet-sized spy TVs at the January Consumer Electronics Show. I mean the International CES (trademark sign). I mean the Consumer Technology Shoe. I mean the International CTA (trademark sign). I mean Missy Elliot’s new video.

In February, Singer Katy Perry eclipsed an otherwise pretty good Super Bowl by dancing alongside a choreographically challenged left shark.

In March, the Federal Aviation Administration allowed drone-based newsgathering in a straight line, with visual contact, several hundred feet from anything. Meanwhile, a KIRO-TV chopper team had their helo buzzed by a drone operated by a guy across town.

With April comes the annual NAB Show, where tens of thousands of people wander the Las Vegas Convention Center asking one another, “weren’t we just here?”

In May, the feds got prickly about false Emergency Alert System tones and fined Nashville’s WSIX-FM 1 million smackeroos for fear that false EAS tones will lull the public into thinking it’s a test. It’s only a test. In the event of a real emergency, you will be directed to consult the nearest Facebook meme for further information.

In June, market researchers proclaimed 2015 the year of the smartwatch, not taking into account that those things are seriously fugly.

The entire Internet winced in July at footage of a handgun-shooting drone. The FAA responded by doing nothing.

In August, we learned about fortitude from the staff at WDBJ-TV.

September is when everybody goes to Amsterdam and you don’t even get a lousy T-shirt.

October saw DirecTV, aka AT&T, or OMG, launch virtual reality programming from a boxing ring, where everyone dreams of vacationing.

November brought 4K NASA TV so we could make out that woman on Mars, and then suddenly…

December. Just when you got used to the idea that it was 2015. Where did the year go? I mean, Missy Elliott’s new video!

To subject yourself to more McAdams On, check out TVTECHNOLOGY.COM/SECTION/MCADAMS-ON, and see how well I did at calling 2015 when it started, at the other “McAdams On: 2015.” And as always, cats and kittens, thank you for reading my humble contributions. May you live long and prosper.

HOLLYWOOD—There are more moving parts in the broadcast TV business than a Swiss watch with tectonic-sized components. There are three major dynamics at play: the transmission signal form, the virtualization of the plant that generates it, and the spectrum upon which it travels.

The signal form is under major renovation by the Advanced Television Systems Committee. The developing transmission standard—ATSC 3.0—holds the promise of 4K and mobile, targeted advertising, on-demand, data delivery and perpetual youth. That last one is iffy, but 3.0 may need creative marketing. It will not work with a single existing TV set, and there will be no spare channel to make the switch. There are very smart people behind 3.0, but from 10,000 feet, it looks like a heavy lift.

Concurrently, we have an acceleration of “function collapse,” which referred to the software impact on the hardware that yielded things like channel-in-a-box. So you didn’t need so many boxes.

Now, we’re moving into an era where you don’t need no stinkin’ boxes. Those boxes are now code strings sitting on a server somewhere in the “cloud.” This media facility virtualization is just beginning, but it appears to be inevitable in the face of new display forms coming down the pike at a rapid clip. Think ABC’s move into virtual reality for news. There will never again be a time when display platforms are static.

And finally, the spectrum auction looms, not unlike the contrived “crisis” created to justify it. Will it work? Sprint tapped out; Verizon is indifferent. The biggest group of sellers that we know of consisted of around 80 TV stations—out of about 2,000 full-power and Class A TV licensees. What will free TV and local news look like afterward? Who knows?

All I do know is that I see more folks in the broadcast community focused on doing their jobs than selling out.

TEXAS, HOLDEM—One of the most contested components of the proposed TV spectrum auction rules is “dynamic reserve pricing.”

In a nutshell, DRP is something the Federal Communications Commission invented to cap the sale price of a TV station in next year’s auction. How it works is a different kettle of fish. I asked several experts, including Scott Flick, partner with Pillsbury in Washington, if he could explain it.

“I’ve not met anyone who can, and you are not the first journalist to ask me,” he wrote in an email. “We’ve debated it internally here, and I can’t say we have come to a definitive description. That is part of the reason why everyone says it greatly undercuts the transparency of the auction. If lawyers are struggling to explain it, your average broadcaster is unlikely to get comfortable with it when there are large sums of money at stake.”

How large is anyone’s guess. The FCC said broadcasters could split $38 billion, presumably from wireless carriers who just spent $45 billion on Advanced Wireless Spectrum. Analysts have questioned whether the carriers will want to hit up the credit markets again so soon, but the general consensus is they will. A 45-page analysis from Kagan concludes that “the carriers will be there and bid hard for the spectrum that suits their needs.”

Their needs include getting into broadcasting because WiFi is eating their cellular lunch. Broadband is becoming the delivery mechanism of everything from television content to controlling the fridge temperature from afar. The industry that controls the airwaves controls this delivery mechanism, and Verizon is on it. The carrier is in the process of rolling out LTE broadcasting “to distribute hundreds of cable networks to millions of wireless customers nationwide,” according to The Donohue Report.

Verizon chief Lowell McAdam has indicated they have plenty of spectrumto pull this off, so where the $38 billion comes fromremains speculative. Eric Moreno of Fox referred to the source of the figure—the first of two “Greenhill Reports”—as “a work of fiction.” The figures were indeed derived from a formula suggested by a coalition of station owners intending to sell.

Both the FCC and this coalition need as many broadcasters to participate in the auction as possible or it simply won’t work. FCC officials have even said that the Greenhill Report figures were designed to “encourage robust participation.”

What they were not designed to do is be paid out. That’s according to one D.C. media attorney who referred to dynamic reserve pricing as a “poison pill.”

“They are starting out with ridiculously high prices to lure broadcasters in that they don’t want to have to pay,” the source said.

Another media attorney put it this way:

“DRP is a way for the FCC to draw broadcasters into the auction by starting off with unrealistically high bids, but then actually pay less than the market price for stations in the auction by making what amounts to a bluff.”

Both attorneys noted that dynamic reserve pricing works in conjunction with “impairment,” which refers to TV stations that get repacked on channels where they interfere with post-auction wireless operations. In other words, they are “stranded” in wireless spectrum.

But they won’t know if they’re stranded in wireless spectrum until after they’ve dropped out of the auction. After each successive auction round, the FCC will run a feasibility check to see if there will be room to repack the station in the broadcast band.

Without DRP and impairment, the commission would have to pay stations the last price they accepted in the auction if there were no channels left for them in the broadcast spectrum. That could very well be the inflated opening bid price.

With DRP and impairment, stations that drop out and wind up stranded in wireless territory would be offered a lower price than the last one they accepted. How much lower is anyone’s guess. The idea is to keep a lid on stations holding out for the big dollars, particularly stations along the borders, where repacking will be complicated by international coordination.

What’s more, the feasibility check does not indicate the final channel assignment for TV stations that drop out of the auction or do not participate at all. At the end of the auction, the commission will run an optimization model that may strand TV stations that did not participate in the auction at all, and throw others back into the broadcast band.

Neither broadcast nor wireless contingents are wild about impairment, and some pretty big players are waiting for clarification on DRP. Fox, Tribune, ION and the coalition of the willing are among those asking how it works. Collectively, they own roughly 15 percent of the 2,202 TV stations eligible for the auction—possibly more.

It’s unlikely for any of them to participate in an auction in which they accept one price and get paid significantly less.

WILDERNESS—There is a practice in the introspective communities of contemplating uncertainty and accepting all outcomes. I think at no other time has this concept been as applicable to the broadcast TV industry as it is today, for a number of reasons.

1. Technology is developing faster than it can be deployed. Consider mobile DTV. The folks behind Dyle and its related initiatives deserve all due credit for their efforts. Remember that it was launched by nearly 130 TV stations, including WCBS in New York, and Belken and Audiovox were making receivers for it.

In the meantime, work on the ATSC broadcast standard skipped over 2.0 entirely as it became clear that a major overhaul was in order. ATSC 3.0 inherently would handle mobile, making the type of overlay used for Dyle obsolete.

2. Audience behavior and preference is becoming dynamically individualized. We all know that we all want what we want when we want it. Let us not now contemplate what that implies about our emotional intelligence, but rather what it means for television content distribution and presentation. Media companies will have to be able to turn out new channels for new platforms and form factors on a dime, and these may rise and fall like species in the fossil record, only faster. Much, much faster.

3. Virtualization is replacing big iron in the media facility. This was so conceptual just a few years ago it seemed like sci-fi. No more. Disney’s move to virtualize ABC’s master control is a huge signal that this type of technology is reaching maturity

4. The emerging broadcast TV transmission standard represents a fundamental departure from decades of linear one-way delivery.

5. And perhaps the most certain of uncertainties: the first-ever voluntary incentive auction of television spectrum to wireless providers.

These factors now comprise the backdrop upon which broadcasting and “television” itself is being re-engineered. What it will look like on the other side, we’ve only begun to imagine.

LAS VEGAS—Television is undergoing a radical transformation that is conceivably more of a quantum leap than the digital transition. That would be the IP transition, which lays the foundation for complete virtualization.

The digital transition, at its core, changed the fabric of the nation’s communications infrastructure, but the media creation-and-delivery mechanism remained for the most part a one-way pipeline. Analog technologies were replaced by digital facsimiles, so system design and functionality initially were similar.

The digital TV transition was reaching its apex right about the time mobile video technologies reached marketable maturity. The same was true for giant, wafer-thin TVs. The result was platform proliferation— screens sizes from palm to wall—each with different delivery requirements. Within media plants, router port counts exploded. The demand for platform-differentiated content required new layers of storage, control, management and conversion.

There has been no such thing as a static media facility design since the digital transition and there never will be again. Television media facilities are now designed to be “future-proof,” which is to say, adaptable.

Adaptation nonetheless requires some heavy lifting as long as media facilities continue to incorporate SDI, as they have for nearly 25 years. Implementing an 8K workflow, for example, would mean a significant, manually intensive physical retrofit.

Not so with an all-IP infrastructure, which could support real-time network reconfiguration without disruption, from a browser portal or even something like an app. It also enables collaboration by people and technologies around the world, something of interest to remote production companies.

The IP transition—which is well underway— ultimately can decouple the media facility from a physical location. It becomes, instead, an actively evolving network where resources are automatically provisioned according to demand, and intermittently used functions become SaaS options. Meeting the ever-expanding format and platform requirements of the future may soon involve a few swipes on a touchscreen.

HERE, AFTER—Can a TV station exist as a local news operation without a signal?

I’ve been casting this question lately and haven’t had a lot of bites. It likely is out of the question in terms of current business models, so why spend the cognitive energy? Another, somewhat larger factor I sense among TV station personnel is that they are focused on what’s in front of them.

Media staffs in general have been so stripped of any perceived redundancy, there is nothing left to scrape but bone. They haven’t the time or energy to keep track of the hijinks at the Federal Communications Commission. Who can go to work day after day and invest their personal best into an operation that may go on the auction block and disappear? We all toil under such auspices to some degree, but it’s easier to ignore a specter that’s not in our face every day.

Yet the specter—in this case, the spectrum auction— is coming, whether next year, the year after, the one after that or maybe all three. Wireless providers will get as much TV spectrum as they want. The upcoming incentive auction is their second dip in the well since 2008, when they took 108 MHz in the 700 MHz band. Those frequencies are still being developed—something conveniently omitted from all the spectrum “crunch” caterwauling during the Julius Genachowski FCC. You don’t hear it so much anymore because A) the propaganda achieved the intended goal of securing Congressional authorization for the incentive auction, B) sometimes, even journalists will question something after repeating it over and over again for a few years, and C) it was horse leavings.

The spectrum-transfer campaign has now morphed into a numbers game where the potential value of a TV station license on auction approaches $1 billion. It already may exceed that. I haven’t looked at the latest estimates because virtually all that I’ve seen so far are arbitrary and backed entirely by agenda-fueled rhetoric. I.e., more horse leavings with a specific intention—bringing broadcast licensees to the table.

One cannot argue with a successful strategy.

Interest in the auction has exploded compared to two years ago. The $45 billion AWS-3 auction at the end of 2014 didn’t hurt: Incentive auction estimates have gone nuts. Whether or not they’re realistic no longer matters. The consensus among broadcast executives with whom I’ve spoken is that “you’d be a fool not to look at the numbers.”

Owners seriously considering a sale will dig past the hyperbolic figures. They’ll look closely at each of their markets and assess competition, availability of media services, recent spectrum acquisition valuations specific to those markets (versus the Brobdingnagian totals proposed by auction promoters), station revenue, market position and local economics. TV stations seem to be holding their own in the local ad market, but who knows for how long, and who wants to hold their own when they can retire in the sun with a humidor of Cohibas?

Let’s count the hands.

While one can make a decent argument that local television news provides a contributive community service, it’s also a business. Businesses have to make money. As much as the Consumer Electronics Association and the user community in general spit nails at paying for content, creators of content comprise mostly soft-bodied animals who require shelter from the elements and regular meals.

For 50 years, we’ve had the uncomplicated triad of journalists, advertisers and broadcasters (or publishers). Our increasingly rapid plunge into the Digital Age is dismantling that arrangement and leaving the components scattered with no clear path to a new structure. Detractors say “citizen” journalism fills the gap, but anyone monitoring Facebook’s meme cavalcade knows there is a greater need than ever before for fact-checking, confirmation and analysis. Snopes cannot go it alone.

The thing we’ve come to know as “news”—the local, regional and global information that may effect our daily lives—was for decades the province of a balance of personalities: Fervid, intellectually curious reporters; dispassionate exacting editors; referees, artists, sales people, accountants and managers. Those were the salad days. These are not. Now we have “one-man bands” and “blog sites.”

Truly, we get what we pay for, and with that in mind, I return to my original query: Can a TV station exist as a local news operation without a signal? Will Verizon and AT&T support market-based news? Will cable and satellite TV service providers pay a fee for it? Can local programming of any sort thrive without national network partnership?

There were 1,782 full-power TV stations in the United States as of last June. Of those, 719 provided local news with fewer people, according to the Radio Television Digital News Association.

As much as traditional journalism has suffered the digital transition and been hijacked in general—think Anonymous, where no one wears a byline—the baby may be sleeping in the proverbial bath water.

Local TV news can be a lifeline, and not just during disasters. A heat wave isn’t exactly a disaster, but it can be if you’re 80 and your air-conditioning goes out and no one knows you’re suffocating. We always hear about the big ones, where people are warned in time to dodge a tornado, or how transmitter engineers in New Orleans risked life and limb to keep a signal on the air.

You don’t hear so much about the heat shelter announcements, food donation coordination, crazy person on the loose bulletins and the myriad other daily pieces of information that keep us safe, informed and prepared when necessary. We’ve had this type of information handed to us for so long that perhaps we’ve forgotten what our lives might be like without it.

We may soon find out.

If I were a betting woman, I would avoid eye contact with broadcasting. The concept of a free, near-ubiquitous media service remains as relevant as ever for democracy, at least to the 43 million Americans who are not online, according to Internet Live Stats. But that’s just around 14 percent of the population—about the same portion not paying for TV, and we’ve already learned that’s not sufficient to justify the use of the airwaves for TV. People want broadband, everywhere, all the time. I guess. That’s what the White House and the wireless lobby would have us believe.

We don’t yet know what broadcasting will look like after the incentive auction, but it’s a safe bet the service will be decimated. While broadcaster participation is anonymous, Michael Dell and others have been acquiring TV licenses with the intent to auction them off, according to published reports, and word on the street is that one of the largest station groups in the country intends to throw in. Add to that the incompatibility of ATSC 3.0 with every existing TV set in America, and well, things don’t look too good for the over-the-air team.

Yet there remains one tiny little problem with the largest infrastructure transition of our time— the bill.

White House officials Megan Smith and Jason Furman would have us believe the $44 billion raised so far in the AWS auction is free money.

“The government doesn’t need to invest its own money, but instead can encourage private investment and make a profit for taxpayers along the way,” they wrote in The Wall Street Journal.

As anyone who pays for any sort of subscription service knows, it does not get cheaper, and system upgrades are paid for through incremental fee hikes.

There’s a big bill coming down the pike for “taxpayers.” That’s probably the safest bet there is.

MEAN, WHILE—Reclassifying broadband access under Title II is like pounding push pins into a cork board with a sledgehammer. The intent is to impose network neutrality rules—no blocking, throttling or fast lanes—of which there have been a total of two incidents. Comcast got caught throttling BitTorrent in 2007, and despite having won that court battle with the FCC, Comcast stopped throttling BitTorrent because it made the Interwebs very, very unhappy. The second instance involved Netflix paying AT&T for a fast lane, to which the Interwebs replied, “meh.”

It seems fast lanes are despised in theory but OK in practice. Fast lanes are what got us to Title II in the first place. Federal Communications Commission Chairman and former cable and telco boss Tom Wheeler proposed allowing Internet fast lanes last May. Internet citizenry went bonkers, much to the delight of Larry and Sergey, the Google Brothers. The chairman’s proposal got something like 4 million comments extolling the virtue of the Internet exactly the way it is now. When Netflix and AT&T announced a fast-lane deal in July—crickets.

Then in November, while the chairman reportedly was telling executives from Google, Yahoo, Etsy and other Websters that he preferred a more “nuanced solution” than Title II, his boss, the president, was racking up views on his YouTube video calling for Title II. (C’mon, guys. It’s not the Federal Passive-Aggressive Communications Commission.)

So what exactly is the point of reclassifying ISPs under Title II? It certainly will appease Larry and Sergey’s 4 million friends and probably keep protesters from blocking Wheeler’s drive, but is it necessary? Analyst Rich Greenfield at BTIG doesn’t think so.

“We did not believe any rules were needed. [The] Internet works great,” he said, sharing a sentiment he tweeted in November: “Dear @BarackObama. Without regulation, my broadband is 100 Mbps from 56 Kbps & costs less than my 1995 phone bill.”

Whether or not it’s necessary is one thing; whether or not it’s even possible is another. Network neutrality itself was hung up in court for six years in two separate lawsuits. Greenfield reckons ISPs will sue over Title II “the minute it’s filed with the Federal Registrar.”

We do not yet know the precise language of Wheeler’s proposal, which will be put to a full commission vote during its Feb. 26 open meeting. The vote’s likely to be 3-2 in favor, with Republicans Ajit Pai and Michael O’Rielly rending their garments. From there, it becomes a hot mess.

Republicans in general cast a hairy eyeball on network neutrality. Democrats in general believe it is the apple in apple pie; meaning that, court cases aside, Congress will have a catfight. Depending on who’s back needs scratched for what, Republicans could overturn a Title II Order with a Congressional Review Act, an amendment to the ’96 Telecommunications Act, or by simply telling the FCC it can’t spend any money on implementation.

Further, Wheeler is proposing a sort of Title II light, with some, but not all, of the provisions outlined in the Telecom Act. Again, we don’t yet know the details of his proposal, but we do understand from information released this week that it will not, for example, impose sections pertaining to rate regulation, Universal Service Fund contributions and other new taxes or fees.

This partial application of Title II is referred to as “forbearance,” something “unlikely to work in this situation,” Wells Fargo analysts wrote in November. “While forbearance is something the FCC has used in the past, Title II in and of itself is so complex—with 70-plus provisions—this is not a realistic or practical solution, in our view.”

Veteran D.C. attorney Jim Burger doesn’t think so, either.

“They basically have stripped so much out of the section that isn’t applicable… prices, for example, terms of service… a whole bunch of things that are regulated for common carriers,” he said. “The interesting thing is, what are the large ISPs going to do? Comcast in particular is saying, ‘look, we’re all for net neutrality light. We’re all right with treating everybody fairly, but we don’t like Title II.’ Somebody out there’s likely to sue because they’ve cherry-picked from Title II.”

Burger also is concerned on a more prosaic level.

“The thing I worry about, with history of bureaucracy and regulation, once you start regulating, it’s hard to stop,” he said. “So the problem with starting a new regulatory regime is, where do you go from there? Rooting out and getting rid of a major function of a regulatory agency is like pulling teeth. Look at all the work that’s already gone into this. Think of them doing Title II… then there’s mission creep. You open up an office of consumer complaints, and consumers start complaining. It takes on a life of its own, and it exists for the purpose of preserving itself.”

So what is a viable alternative to imposing Title II in order to ensure network neutrality principles? Again, Jim Burger:

“All of this stuff wouldn’t be a problem if we had competition.”

THE CLOISTER—Two-thousand-and- fifteen will be the year of the drone. Drones will be everywhere. Former VH1 exposé architect Jeff Gaspin will use them to create a reality show of live feeds shot surreptitiously throughout backyards on major barbecue holidays, when Americans are at their most intimate with canned beer.

Anyone who even thinks about suing will be held hostage by threat of exposure over that extremely inappropriate email they sent about the boss three years ago, but lawsuits won’t be a problem because the national appetite for television “fame” will have reached its apex. Preferring not to appear on television will be added to the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.” TV Aversion Syndrome will be treated through the forced application of pancake make-up and Spanx.

In 2015, 10-year-old Willow Harkendorrf of Agar, S.D. will create a solar technology that will make power cords obsolete. Silicon Valley will not believe it and therefore not fund it because she is a girl.

Two-thousand-fifteen will mark the end of all eye contact between human beings, who will interact exclusively through smart eyewear. People who are unpleasant, challenging or annoyingly attractive will simply be dispatched with a sideways glance. For real.

Google will introduce an implant in 2015 that will conduct Boolean searches in the brain, but it will not be able to crack the code for finding where I laid those keys that I swear were right here.

Also in 2015—at least through March—I will write “2014” whenever I date something. Of this, one can rest assured.

It is also a reasonably safe bet that I will not self-sensor my electronic correspondence, despite all logic to the contrary. When it is finally divulged in a sweeping offshore hack orchestrated by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, I will be exposed as the mad genius I am, and still, no one will notice.

Have a good one.

....every piece of technology in my household became obsolete. Even the 50-inch 4KTV, that I bought in July is a relic.

It’s not “smart.”

For $400 and a little bezel damage, would you care if your TV couldn’t cruise YouTube on its own; that you had to buy a peripheral device the size of cake of soap for $100 to get it to do that? Nah, I didn’t think so.

Then again, what passes for a “smart” TV uses see-and-spell technology for searches. “Using the arrow on your remote, find and select the letters of your search subject.” Really, Silicon Valley super whizzes? Really?

Then yet again, how smart does one really want one’s TV to be? Even as I do these see-and-spell exercises, the soap cake is remembering them.

“You might like this,” it says, but I never fall for it. I won’t be owned by a cake of soap. Irrational feelings, yes, but not a cake of soap.

I think now might be an ideal time to categorically deny everything that’s ever appeared or will appear in my electronic record and state that it is clearly the work of malicious hackers of unknown origin.

It’s pretty much a given that the next generation… (I’m sorry. I’m over that phrase, too. We are open to suggestion.) The next generation of smart TVs will be voice-controlled. I’d prefer mine gesture-controlled, but that opens up a completely different set of nightmare scenarios compared to the first. Because as you all know, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have now joined those informing us that our smart technology is going to take us down. How hard could it be? We’re giving it the wheel of the car. The only people left will be those driving vehicles with push-button locks and crank windows.

And stupid TVs.

UNDER, WATER—The monthly open meeting of the five FCC commissioners this week was three-hour affair of protests, exposition and verbal pugilism according to Robert’s Rules of Order. A cross between “Survivor” and a Henry James novel that illustrated a deep divide at the commission over how the TV spectrum incentive auction should play out.

The commission is under the gun to hold the auction, even though it’s been postponed by several months into early 2016. If it doesn’t go down before the 2016 election and Republicans take over the White House, it could get surgically dismantled. The two Republicans on the commission most definitely do not like the direction Democratic FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is taking it.

“Rather than shore up our overall path, the commission proposes a series of unnecessary, outcome-driven machinations and tentative conclusions to bolster its ability to claim success at the close of the auction,” said Michael O’Rielly, one of the two.

The other, Ajit Pai, a young firebrand who frequently invokes his rural Kansas roots, said, “I was disappointed by the rules that the commission adopted on a party-line vote back in May. These rules introduce unnecessary complexity into the incentive auction. They restrict participation in the forward auction. Instead of allowing market forces to govern, they attempt to manipulate the results through the blunt levers of command and control. And they unnecessarily provoked litigation. Now the incentive auction won’t start until at least 2016.”

The litigation he mentions refers to lawsuits filed in the D.C. Federal Court of Appeals by Sinclair Broadcast Group and the National Association of Broadcasters. Final briefings in both are due in mid-January. I’ve heard zero discussion about odds on which way the court will go, but the judges are faced with some pretty abstruse engineering concepts in one, and basic points of law in the other.

If the court orders the FCC to reconstruct its auction rules, the likelihood of it being pulled off before the election is irrationally optimistic. The FCC staff obviously is pulling the oars downstairs at peak power already. Pushing the auction process in the name of getting it done during the Obama Administration could throw the TV spectrum into chaos—of no avail to anyone.

Thursday’s meeting involved a Public Notice seeking comment on suggested particulars for the final auction rules. These included a spectrum clearing target totaling 84 MHz, at an average price of $1.25 MHz/pop (or population per megahertz, but the abbreviation is in Yoda-speak), bidding rules, interference thresholds and the calculatory criteria for determining opening bid prices.

Pai has a point about complexity. The final Notice has not yet been released, but it was presented in Thursday’s meeting by Martha Stancill of the Wireless Bureau.

“The comment proposes to limit overall impairments on a national basis to less than 20 percent of weighted pops, meaning the population in each market will be weighted by the relative value of the market based on prior auction prices,” she said. “This weighting will help to ensure that most of the spectrum in the most heavily weighted [partial economic areas] remains unimpaired, so as not to cause too many impairments across the most valuable markets.”

As far as I can discern, this means the commission will accept up to 49 percent interference in 20 percent of the spectrum auctioned, inordinately in rural areas. Frankly, I look forward to learning what this actually means and what the potential impact is on both broadcasters and wireless carriers, and ultimately on the people who use their services.

“At the end of each round, the auction system will assess whether the final stage rule has been satisfied,” Stancill continued. “For this, the comment proposes an average price per megahertz/pop of $1.25 in traditionally high-demand markets and a spectrum benchmark of 70 MHz, which requires clearing 84 MHz.”

How this $1.25 was devised versus the $1.50 in the recently released Greenhill Report has not yet been revealed. The same report calculated a $45 billion haul based on clearing 126 versus 84 MHz of spectrum. Here’s Wells Fargo’s Marci Ryvicker on the discrepancy:

“We have no idea why the PN figures differ from what the FCC provided via the Greenhill Report, and sort of confirms broadcast distrust of the FCC—recall most groups didn’t view the Greenhill Report as an honest assessment of take-home valuations….”

There are several more items in the Public Notice, each equally if not more recondite, including one for “dynamic reserve pricing” which essentially gives the FCC discretion over opening bid prices. O’Rielly said the strategy could strand some TV stations in the duplex gap or guard bands—the buffer zones between wireless up- and downlink spectrum, and between wireless and broadcast services. How this would come about is not quite clear.

As much as the staff has undoubtedly tried to keep the auction process simple, doing so appears to be an impossibility. As Wheeler stated, “There are multiple moving pieces, none of which, or few of which, move independently. So you make a decision here, it affects this here, and the balancing and the give and take and the connectivity between all of these issues is immense.”

So it is, making November of 2016 closer than it might appear.

On a separate note, I want to commend FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler for allowing net neutrality protesters some airtime.

“FCC is accommodating Title II protestors at meeting,” D.C. media policy sleuth John Eggerton tweeted. ‘We’re not blocking protesters’ access,’ says spokesperson for chairman.”

Wheeler said the protests exemplified the First Amendment in action, and were “what this country is all about.” This was after a team of protesters blocked his driveway a month ago and captured the episode for YouTube. It’s to the chairman’s credit that he’s trying to keep the situation respectful and civilized, though somewhat baffling to the protesters who are clearly prepared to be dragged off, presumably by jack-booted thugs. Hopefully they were not disappointed.

RIGHT, HERE— It’s probably a form of sacrilege to refer to technology as “clunky” under the banner of a technology publication, but I refer primarily to what I use on a daily basis and how I’ve watched it evolve.

Twenty or so years ago, I produced a small-town newspaper on a PowerBook 1400. I still have one somewhere, waiting for me to extract the files, because such things are no simple matter, and I accepted to some degree the inevitability of losing some files between upgrades because the act of transfer can involve a nest of cables, devices, drivers and virtually hours of entertainment if you enjoy that kind of thing, which I do not. And there was a point in my life, I had enough cables to right the Costa Concordia.

Now I know there are those who read our fine publication with rooms; basements, garages and even second homes filled with wires, monitors, amplifiers, batteries, base stations and solder flux, but I am not one of you. I am your friendly interpreter for others like me who do not have open accounts at Radio Shack and collections of vintage vacuum tubes.

Back to the issue of file transfers between upgrades. I know that media facility folks can tell me a thing or two about file transfers, but I’m just talking the regular stuff you want to move from one computer to another. We have the cloud now, and a lot of cloud acolytes, but cloud services can be picky and squirrely. Is anyone else using Apple’s iCloud? It’s like, “Oh, no, we can’t handle those free music files from KCRW. We’re not loading those on your phone.”

Now let me be clear here when I say that I realize this is a ridiculous problem of affluence that has no bearing on the human race whatsoever, but that said, is this or is this not the “Digital Age?” How is it that so much of the technology upon which this era is based is incompatible with so much of the technology upon which this era was based? And please do not refer me to some abstruse thread on a presumed “help” site. This stuff should work without me having to re-engineer it. I think I speak for just about everyone who is not a ham radio operator when I say that I’m not interested in forever configuring stuff I just paid money for. I want it to work the way I want it to work. Like a car. I get in it. I drive it. Sometimes too fast, according to a selection of Western states, but that is neither here nor there.

I have a colleague who suggests I read user manuals, but my brain seldom picks up what it needs from user manuals. I’m an observational learner, and I’m guessing there’s more than just the one of us. I should also add here that there are many, many people in my life who consider me tech savvy. After having just read the 400-some odd words with which I’ve just violated the power grid, do the both of you consider me “tech savvy,” or closer to the lady with the dial phone? (I’d have a dial phone for sure if I could, but then I’d have to recruit people to call me and then talk to them! Working from this bunker in an undisclosed location using various forms of email and instant messaging, I’m no longer certain if I can speak on a daily basis.)

I’m making a point here, but not with any due urgency, that the technology I am using now, which may seem lightish-years ahead of what I used two decades ago, will seem both frightfully ancient and possibly more elegant in some ways than what’s coming down the pike 20 years hence. I used to reload the operating system on my Power Mac G5 on a regular basis to make the thing work the way I wanted, and sometimes just because I could.

I would not dare reload an operating system today. I also notice that laptops are designed fundamentally the same as they were 20 years ago, with the same torturous ergonomics as a bloody typewriter, except the typewriter did not destroy ones wrists and render the upper back muscles unnaturally long. Imagine that.

It’s not just the hardware, as I’ve mentioned in reference to the cloud. The software platforms I use are full of idiosyncrasies. The Word program on this Mac is hinky with random jumps and inexplicable duplicated text that appears and disappears because, well, it just does. So I work around it. I do so many work-arounds with software, I soon fail to notice them. My go-to IT person would strenuously disagree, but she does not know the extent to which I do not enlist her help. (And yes, I emptied the infernal cache!)

I will not even start in on the various content management systems to which my fragile being has been subjected, which at times have made water torture seem like a considerable alternative. I save my help ticket points for such times.

And another thing… Whoever broke the digital display on a Nokia brick? I don’t think so. You could drive over those things with a Ford F150. The iPhone 5C? Please. Or how about the new bendy iPhone? And why do these things drown so easily? And why don’t they come with a case, since it’s imperative to have one to bring the display breakage quotient down to remote hopefulness?

I know I sound like my own grandmother harping about that music you kids listen to, but seriously. Over the next two decades of development, can we solve interoperability and at least some of the software hijinks we deal with now? I understand that what we use now is wildly more complex and featurey than the old stuff, but much of it’s also unnecessarily buggy and clunky at times. E.g., I can attest that publishing in plain old HTML was miles easier and faster than using a CMS. I acknowledge the added features and functions of a CMS, but using them can be glaring examples of why developers should listen to their prospective users. Don’t tell me what I need to do work that I’ve done for 40,000 hours. I’m not an egghead by any measure, but after about 40,000 hours, I begin to catch on.

So that’s my rant for the day. Pretty harmless, really. I’ve got a pie to bake. Ta ta for now, and have a very lovely holiday. ~ D.

HERE, NOW— This is directed to anyone thinking about selling their TV spectrum based on the $45 billion in auction proceeds projected by the Federal Communications Commission.

I am sharing details of the release of this figure because I think anyone considering selling their broadcast license has a right to know them. I believe that under the circumstances, the FCC would agree. It is in the commission’s and the Administration’s best interest to have everyone go into this auction with as much information as possible; information that is as accurate as possible or states clearly when it is conjecture.

I recount this from my perspective as a reporter. Any generalization I make with regard to reporters is primarily a reflection of my own course of action. It happened as follows.

A conference call on an the incentive auction with embargoed information was announced via email on Tuesday, Sept. 30 at around 4 p.m. Eastern Time. It was supposed to be embargoed through 12:30 p.m. Wednesday, the following day.

The reporters who received the email awoke to see the news leaked. The Wall Street Journal and B&C both posted it at precisely midnight, Sept. 30. It was old news now, but we queued up for the conference call nonetheless. While one reporter griped about the leak and disparaged the embargo, I sent the “Greenhill Report,” as it was called, to several sources in order to confirm or otherwise deconstruct its $45 billion projection.

I expected a lot more feedback than I got right away because the figure was already in the wild for hours by then. It seemed unreasonably high compared to the $28 billion originally projected in the jobs bill and the $24.5 billion projected by the Congressional Budget Office for 84 MHz of TV spectrum. Even figuring for 126 MHz, as the Greenhill Report did, the CBO’s estimate would yield $36.7 billion.

So where did $45 billion come from? We were led to believe it was a valuation of $1.50 MHz/pop for 126 MHz. Both figures are assumed. ($/MHz/pop is total price paid for a license divided by number of MHz times population covered. It is accurate only for completed auctions, not projections, which also must take into account location, demand, interference, congestion and other mitigating factors.)

That 126 MHz will be volunteered for auction is hopeful at best. The National Broadband Plan, introduced in 2010, called for 120 MHz. The number heard most often in private discussions is 84 MHz—tops.

The $1.50 MHz/pop is not unrealistic based on past auctions. The average for the 2008 spectrum auction was $1.22 MHz/pop, with AT&T and Verizon paying $1.51 MHz/pop on average.

At this point, it was close to 12:30 p.m., the end of the embargo. I wasn’t married to the idea of posting that instant, but I didn’t want to wait much longer. In digital news, each moment of delay means fewer readers and less impact, even if you come up with a completely different perspective.

With this auction in particular, there is a void of information into which anything as attention-grabbing as $45 billion is going to proliferate rapidly and immediately become entrenched in all discussions that follow. I didn’t want to be part of something that perpetuated a false notion, but I received no qualified feedback indicating the number was untenable. As I said, the news was already old and getting older by the minute.

At 1:06 p.m., I posted the story with the headline, “FCC Interference Pricing Projects $45 Billion in Proceeds.” In the ensuing hours, I started hearing from some of the other sources. Late that night, I was directed to the “independent studies” cited in the Greenhill Report for the $45 billion estimate.

These “independent studies” comprised a single ex parte filing describing a June 11 meeting among FCC officials and representatives of the Expanding Opportunities for Broadcasters Coalition. This is the group of station owners preparing to sell their spectrum. They have the most to gain from a projection that provokes more participation in the auction.

The $45 billion figure, it turned out, was based entirely on AT&T’s pledge to spend $9 billion at the auction if its bid to acquire DirecTV was approved. Four more bids of $9 billion each for the same amount of spectrum would be necessary bring the total to $45 billion. The $1.50 MHz/pop figure is a derivation thereof, rather than a calculation involving previous auctions and the mitigating factors mentioned above.

(To the FCC staff’s credit, they emphasized, multiple times, that the figures in the Greenhill Report were “high-end” estimates. This was reiterated by FCC Incentive Auction Vice Chairman Howard Symons during the Wells Fargo Technology Media & Telecom Conference in New York on Thursday, who also said the Greenhill figures did not represent bid reserve prices.)

The next morning, I published “$45 Billion Auction Projection Rests on AT&T’s DirecTV Acquisition Pledge” but it was already too late. The figure had already circulated for nearly 36 hours, long enough to take hold in all subsequent reporting about the auction.

I bring up the issue here again for two specific reasons. One is the announcement this week that the FCC intends to launch a 50-market tour in January to pitch the auction to broadcasters—based on the information in the Greenhill Report.

The other, and possibly more critical reason is that there is absolutely no guarantee of participation by any wireless provider at this point. AT&T’s acquisition of DirecTV remains pending. The FCC stopped the 180-day shot clock on the deal last month. The provider also responded to President Obama’s call to impose network neutrality under Title II by announcing it would postpone its fiber upgrades until the issue was settled.

Up to now, wireless networks have managed to fly below the network neutrality radar, but Obama’s Title II ploy creates regulatory uncertainty across the board. Especially since his philosophy is at odds with that of his FCC chairman.

I can’t say whether the $45 billion projection is completely unrealistic or within reason, and quite frankly, I don’t believe anyone else can, either. As it stands today, the auction is a collection of moving targets that will determine the course of thousands of businesses and many more thousands of household incomes. Broadcasters—and those they employ—deserve every possible piece of information available in order to make a decision about participating.

That also includes where the information comes from.

HOLLYWOOD & HIGHLAND—Hollywood was recently overrun with unsung stars; non-celebrities whose contributions to 21st century communications are not fully appreciated. It is not widely acknowledged that nearly everything we take for granted in the way of visual media was born of the work that enabled the digital transition. Media has not been the same since, and has in fact exploded into a diversity of platforms, devices and form factors.

The Technical Conference of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers is held in Hollywood each October. For a land grant j-school grad, it’s like a crash course in physics, engineering, sociology, communication theory and applied linguistics. It is one of the most fascinating and mentally exhausting events I attend. It also elucidates the rift between the legal and engineering communities that often seems to foster destructive decisions by the courts and agenda-compelled regulators. In many ways, this rift comes down to the argot of engineering.

E.g., I spent 90 minutes in a series of presentations about clocks. One does not give much thought to the roll of clocks in television from the couch potato perspective. From the origination perspective, however, clocks comprise protocols and code; can be masters, slaves, virtual or transparent; and must behave precisely in synchronization across a variety of interfaces, connections, systems and distances in order for television not to become an unintelligible mess. All such clocks count time to the nanosecond, starting Jan. 1, 1970. Why, I’ve no idea. I do realize, however, after 90 minutes of clock lecturing, that an absolutely seamless TV viewing experience across multiple devices is alchemy. Like the Sidney Harris cartoon featuring a mathematical formula that includes, “then a miracle occurs.”

Miracles don’t occur overnight, in a vacuum, while various powers that be arbitrarily change the desired outcome. It would serve us all well if those in positions of power could develop a greater understanding of wizards who make TV possible.

BEHIND THE LINES— There is no escaping scrutiny in a connected world. The city officials of Ferguson, Mo., discovered this the hard way. My first email on Thursday was from an Al Jazeera America flack who said the network’s news crew there was tear-gassed.

“Last night at 10:30 p.m. CD in Ferguson, Mo., an Al Jazeera America news crew was reporting behind police barricades. They were easily identifiable as a working television crew. As they were setting up their camera for a live report, tear gas canisters landed in their proximity and police fired rubber bullets in their direction. Police continued to shoot after crew members clearly and repeatedly shouted ‘Press.’

The situation, as reflected in the press for the ensuing hours, was one of dystopian chaos; of generations of bad blood exploding across the media from a suburb no one heard of until Sunday. Where the shining light was not welcome. Where Wesley Lowery of The Washington Post and Ryan Reilly of Huffington Post were detained for allegedly trespassing in a McDonalds, where they were both posting over the franchise’s Wi-Fi. Lowery wrote a first-hand account of his arrest, which in turn fanned flames on Twitter, where Anonymous tweeted what it said was the name of the police officer who shot Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black kid with his hands in the air, according to witnesses.

The press picked up on it and reported the reveal, but not the guy’s name. Anonymous, meanwhile, hashtaged him, opening an electronic conduit of hatred in his direction. The St. Louis and Ferguson police said they’d outted a dispatcher. Twitter suspended Anonymous, or rather, @TheAnonMessage—one of many Anonymi—which then moved over to @TheAnonMessage2. The Internet officially doesn’t care if the outted guy was a dispatcher or the police officer who shot and killed Brown. He continued getting hate messages after reports emerged that he was misidentified.

Meanwhile, headlines kept rolling about journalists being targeted. “Journalists Arrested, Assaulted, and Teargassed in Ferguson” in Newsweek includes a photo of the Al Jazeera news team running from a tear-gas canister billowing smoke. “Press freedom? Police target media, arrest and teargas reporters atFerguson,” at RT has the same image, plus a group shot purportedly of Ferguson police officers dressed in military garb and standing in front of what appears to be an armored Humvee.

KDSK-TV has video of the Al Jazeera crew being tear-gassed. KDSK, the Gannett-owned NBC in St. Louis, had two photojournalists and reporter Elizabeth Matthews at the scene. One of the camera operators, a 23-year veteran news shooter, was recording a confrontation between a citizen and a police officer before taking a “bean bag round” to the camcorder, according to KDSK. They were subsequently run off.

Al Jazeera followed up with comments from the news team in Ferguson.

“We were very surprised by this. We had been there for about an hour,” said Ash-har Quraishi, chief correspondent for Al Jazeera America’s Chicago Bureau. “We had been in contact with police officers who were just feet away from us. I had spoken to police officers who knew we were there. We had had discussions with them. We understood this was as far as we could get in terms of where the protest was going on, about a mile up the road. So, we didn’t think there would be any problems here so we were very surprised.

“We were very close to where those [tear gas] canisters were shot from. We yelled, as you heard there [on the video]. We were yelling that we were press. But they continued to fire. We retreated about half a block into the neighborhood, until we could get out of that situation.

“Police have said that protestors tossed Molotov cocktails in their direction. We didn’t see that because we weren’t close enough in. Again, as you mentioned, we didn’t have gas masks because we were about a mile away…. We thought we were at a safe distance but clearly, they pushed through and actually fired [tear gas] canisters into the neighborhood.”

From Marla Cichowski, Al Jazeera field producer:

“We were clearly set up as press with a full live shot set-up. As soon as first bullet hit the car we screamed out loud, ‘We are press,’ ‘This is media.’Police that were there at the intersection directing traffic earlier knew we were there. We never drove around the police barricade…. There was another station local NBC parked across the street from us the whole time. They shined a huge floodlight at us before firing and I can only imagine they could see what they were shooting at.”

And from Kate O’Brien, president of Al Jazeera America:

“Al Jazeera America is stunned by this egregious assault on freedom of the press that was clearly intended to have a chilling effect on our ability to cover this important story. Thankfully all three crew members are physically fine.

“We believe that this situation must be investigated along with those involving our colleagues at other media outlets.”

Elsewhere in the media fabric, @TheAnonMessage2 continued to tweet. “Operation #Ferguson was created long before EMS allegedly came to the scene of #MikeBrown's death. If that doesn't shock you... In fact, we know that EMS never ended up coming.”

There is no escaping scrutiny in a connected world.

CUSTOMERLAND—There was a time when the Comcast-Time Warner Cable marriage would have stood out as much for the contrary nature of the lovebirds as the sheer size of the deal. Comcast was deliberate in its acquisitions, methodical with the integrations, and mindful of public perception both on the premises and Capitol Hill, where you never heard about it taking out full-page ads attacking retransmission consent law.

Didn’t happen. Comcast was too cool, and frequently had too much in the regulatory approval pipeline to stir up pesky lobbying flaps. It also had the mightiest negotiating leverage of any pay TV operator, so it didn’t need to lean on Congress for much of anything. That, and the CEO plays golf with the president. Of the United States.

Then you had TWC at No. 2. The second largest U.S. cable operator after Comcast. TWC has been fighting retransmission consent without gloves for 15 years, taking it public big time in the late ‘90s by pulling ABC during its run of a blockbuster primetime game show. Each year since, a member of Congress has waived a piece of paper and issued mildly stern statements about citizens being deprived of TV, as if TV is an inalienable right that people should get over-the-air for free.

See how I did that?

Both companies were not like the other on the customer side, as well, or so it seemed. People generally have no love for their particular pay TV provider. It’s more of reactionary scale of dislike, with Comcast landing in the shrug zone and TWC evoking the type of vitriol usually saved for opposing sports teams.

A lot of it had to do with infrastructure. TWC picked up the bulk of Adelphia subscribers eight years ago after the company went bankrupt because John and Tim Rigas forgot to not pilfer profits that probably should have gone into network maintenance. Cable TV service in areas of Los Angeles, where TWC picked up 1 million former Adelphia subscribers, is still notoriously unstable. I have a relative in the Valley who has to call them up about once a week to reset her set-top, because they apparently can’t be bothered to bring her one that works. Or they don’t have one that works.

I haven’t seen enough examples of TWC’s premium digital package to see what they’re turning HD into; but I’d bet it’s not pretty for networks unable to negotiate bit rate. TWC is not likely alone in its bandwidth conservation methodology. I’ve seen moon-landing resolutions of HD source material on pay TV systems across the country. This squeeze play behooved the big operators in two ways. As they packed more channels into their pipes, they made more money on subscription packages over the same creaky infrastructures. At the same time, they could throw the blame for price hikes at broadcasters and take the focus off a la carte, even while carrying 30 cable-only channels that no one watched. They hate that a la carte thing with which the Internet is now eating their lunch.

But back to reactionary scale of dislike. Comcast was downgraded from a “meh” to “pox” last month when AOL Vice President of Product Ryan Block posted a recording of a call he made of a Comcast rep who did everything but conjure self-immolation and a plague of locusts to upsell rather than cancel Block’s service. The audio file went DEFCON ebola and spawned a series on The Verge of current and former Comcast employees confirming the obvious: “Customer service has been replaced by an obsession with sales, technicians are understaffed, tech support is poorly trained, and the telecommunications behemoth is hobbled by internal fragmentation.”

There is but one and only one reason both Comcast and TWC and any other company gets by with customer abuse: There is no real competition among broadband providers. There was exactly one choice where I am in TWC’s footprint, and where Verizon has lost interest in wires. The tech who came to connect me was kept on hold for about 30 minutes by his own support team while he was trying to accomplish a five-minute job. I offered him tea. If the company treated its own like that, how would it treat me, the customer?

Oh. That’s right. There are no more “customers,” but rather “revenue-generating units,” a collective that Comcast apparently disdains so thoroughly it has dropped all pretense of customer service. Complaints about shoddy service and buggy boxes do nothing for average revenue per unit. Rather than finding out why subscribers are canceling, Comcast has elected a strategy of haranguing them into buying even more expensive lousy service.

If my 94-year-old auntie had been treated like Block was, I would have called the attorney general’s office and sent a picture of her and her doggie to Nancy Pelosi. The folks at the NAB would be all ----->

Comcast and TWC might very well be hitting the point of entropy that all empire-building endeavors encounter, when thoughtful, sustainable integration is abandoned entirely in the quest for more. Hopefully, the bad press has inspired genuine reflection about how customers are treated, versus how much they can be soaked for on the fly.

Because Google fiber.

THIMBLERIG— Now that the highest court in the United States has determined that Aereo is breaking the law, it is countering with the clever strategy of claiming that it’s not breaking the law because the Supreme Court said it resembles a cable system. By extension, Aereo says it’s therefore eligible to negotiate for the carriage of TV signals. That was the upshot of its response to the district court judge whose denial of an injunction against Aereo was overturned by the Supreme Court last month.

“If Aereo is a ‘cable system’ as that term is defined in the Copyright Act, it is eligible for a statutory license, and its transmissions may not be enjoined,” Bruce P. Keller of Debevoise & Plimpton LLP wrote in a joint letter with the plaintiffs to Judge Alison Nathan of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

The high court basically told Judge Nathan to issue the injunction. Aereo basically told Judge Nathan not to issue the injunction because it really isn’t what it said it was back when she denied the injunction.

Because, you see, Aereo is the mayor on HBO’s “True Blood.”

“The Supreme Court has announced a new and different rule governing Aereo’s operations.” Keller wrote for Aereo. “Under the Second Circuit’s precedents, Aereo was a provider of technology and equipment with respect to the near-live transmissions at issue in the preliminary injunction appeal. After the Supreme Court’s decision, Aereo is a cable system with respect to those transmissions.”

The broadcast plaintiffs in the case responded with words to the effect of, “what are these guys smoking?”

“It is astonishing for Aereo to contend that the Supreme Court’s decision automatically transformed Aereo into a ‘cable system,’” Keller wrote for the plaintiffs.

Aereo says it’s eligible to carry TV signals pursuant to the Copyright Act, Title 17, wavy sign 111, which defines the “limitations on exclusive rights: Secondary transmissions of broadcast programming by cable,” and serves as a natural alternative to Sominex.

However, Copyright Act, Title 17, wavy sign 111 says secondary transmission is “permissible under the rules, regulations or authorizations of the Federal Communications Commission.” And the FCC says in 47 Code of Federal Regulations wavy sign 76.64(a) that “no multichannel video programming distributor shall retransmit the signal of any commercial broadcasting station without the express authority of the originating station,” emphasis mine. Exceptions include must-carry and distant signals for unserved households, which do not apply to Aereo.

And so, to the first point: Did the Supreme Court define Aereo as a cable system, or is this a classic case of language filtering. It was a short-lived relationship, after all. Here’s what the ruling said, emphasis also mine:

“Because Aereo’s activities are substantially similar to those of the [community antenna TV] companies that Congress amended the [Copyright] Act to reach, Aereo is not simply an equipment provider.”

This does not appear to be a classification. Jim Burger, a media and intellectual property attorney with Thomson Coburn LLC, said in fact that the court did not formally define Aereo as a cable system, per se. Had it done so, Aereo and everything like it would have become the FCC’s headache. However, the opinion leaves much to be desired, according to Gus Horowitz, a telecom attorney at the University of Nebraska College of Law.

“Even though it reaches the correct outcome, the Supreme Court’s Aereo opinion is staggeringly, and confusingly, bad. The court’s ‘looks like cable’ analysis fails to address the difficult questions about the meaning of the Copyright Act; rather, it has added to existing confusion,” he wrote for Tech Policy Daily.

Even if Judge Nathan accepts that the high court defined Aereo as a cable system, there’s that pesky sticky wicket of “express authority,” something the FCC recently reiterated with a $2.25 million fine against a Texas cable operator. Media attorney R. Scott Flick with Pillsbury in D.C.:

“The Supreme Court clearly did not rule that Aereo was a cable system for purposes of applying the compulsory license, and even if it had, it still wouldn't circumvent the need to get retrans consent from the broadcasters Aereo wants to carry. More importantly, Aereo’s copyright infringement up to this point carries potential damages awards to broadcasters in the multi-billions of dollars, making any rescue effort by Aereo too little, too late. 

This goes to what the Mr. Keller wrote for broadcasters in the aforementioned joint letter:

“Have these guys stepped off a curb and hit their head?”

Or rather, whether or not the court entertains the cable definition defense, the injunction should be imposed “given the court’s ruling that Aereo has been violating plaintiff’s exclusive rights to publicly perform their works for over two years, during which time plaintiffs, as the court held, have suffered irreparable harm.”

And “irreparable harm,” ladies and gentleman, is a core component of the justification for an injunction. “Irreparable” in that it can’t be measured in the way the judges in the Fox-Dish Hopper stand-off suggest is possible. (See the superbly crafted piece, “Fox v. Dish Hopper: Court Skeptical of ‘Irreparable Damages.”) The Aereo damage is arguably irreparable because the TV stations in the 13 markets where it launched have no way to measure its impact on ratings, the universal currency of ad revenue.

Finally, Aereo argues that even if the court grants an injunction for “near-simultaneous” playback, it should not cover recording under the precedent set in Cablevision. This conveniently ignores “express authority.” Aereo’s plea to the district court amounts to a Hail Mary in overtime, or as Mr. Flick writes: “Aereo is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic not as it sinks, but as it sits on the bottom of the ocean.”

One more point peripheral to Aereo is the implication of the Supreme Court’s ruling, made by Mr. Burger.

“Under this ruling, Google comes up with a local OTT package,” he said. “They could go to the broadcasters with a check.”

It seems the fun has just begun.

OUTSIDE, BELTWAY—There is a willful ignorance in Washington, D.C. of the ripple effects of lawmaking. It’s like that little old lady who cuts you off in traffic. If she doesn’t look at you, you don’t exist. I’m sure this calculated incomprehension cuts across all D.C. agencies, but we have a front-row seat to the FCC.

It’s clear the commission intends to do away with broadcast television. References to the “value” of broadcasting and “all reasonable effort” to preserve it resemble the imposturous passive-aggressive semantics employed by a benign torturer.

“I don’t want to do this, but I have to.”

The battle to kill broadcasting is a campaign by wireless providers—pure and simple—with pay-TV and the consumer electronics lobby cheering them on. It is cast as a battle against an entrenched titan unwilling to evolve for the greater good.

Far from being a titan, broadcasting is an industry of mom-and-pops, entrepreneurs and boot-strappers as much if not more than of corporate entities. There’s a substantial economic vertical that provides technology and services to broadcasters that’s being decimated by the twin forces of regulatory caprice and virtualization.

The revolving-door FCC legacy-building leadership ignores its deleterious impact on existing jobs, preferring instead to cite magical figures of jobs that will surely be created someday. It is a disservice to the nation and ultimately, the greater good, that the plan to alter the nation’s video media infrastructure is based on rhetoric rather than factual analysis.

The public was scared into believing in a non-existent spectrum crunch that one prominent former MIT professor characterized as absurd. Data usage figures derived from what may well be peak mobile uptake were used to make wildly escalating demand projections, with no consideration for the inevitable leveling off. The focus was kept deliberately off of making more spectrally efficient technologies.

It is under these distractive auspices that more TV spectrum will be auctioned off yet again, when indeed there is but one reason.

Congress already spent the money.

HERE, THERE —The FCC issued rules last week that will alter the nation’s video media infrastructure in ways not yet fully imagined much less understood by all who will be affected. That is the one certainty regarding the spectrum incentive auction, due to take place next year. The ambiguity of this untried type of spectrum auction is but one factor of many contributing to the prevalence of uncertainty in the media delivery business, especially for broadcasters and their suppliers.

Aereo is due to be decided this month by the U.S. Supreme Court. If Aereo prevails, it will not mean free-for-all Internet distribution of all broadcast (and cable) signals right away, but it will be a step closer. Aereo’s legality is not the question before the high court. It technically will not be deciding if Aereo is violating copyright law by carrying broadcast TV signals without obtaining permission. It is deciding on whether or not the lower court erred by not granting an injunction to broadcasters to shut down Aereo while the copyright question was being deliberated.

There’s a lot of SCOTUS-watching on this one. Experts with far more insight than I possess are giving even odds, and I agree in the sense that I think the court will rule on this as narrowly as possible. Even though the justices appeared skeptical of Aereo’s claims during oral arguments, they also acknowledged the complexity beyond the question of the injunction—how to apply 1990s media law to a medium that did not exist then.

Into this cauldron throw network neutrality and what it may or may not come to mean to the Internet and everything distributed therein. Including whatever Aereo may or may not do, and whether or not the two or three giant pay TV distributors left standing invest their billions in wires or towers.

And then, Google. Google stands on its own because it has single-handedly thrown media policy into chaos with subtle cunning. Google invented network neutrality, opened the TV spectrum to unlicensed devices, and stranded the D Block of spectrum in the 2008 auction. The NSA calls Google when it loses its keys, so it’s a very safe bet that no matter where the chips fall in Washington, D.C., Google will sweep through them like a baleen whale in a swarm of krill.

Media ownership deserves at least a mention in the examination of moving parts, if only a cursory one. FCC rules are forcing TV station divestitures and closings even as the agency kisses the rings of Comcast and AT&T and their respective multi-billion dollar alliances with TWC and DirecTV. It’s so absurd as to have crossed the threshold of credulity, like putting a lobbyist in charge of communications policy.

As if all of these things and a million other picayune rules weren’t enough to throw the broadcast sector particularly into turmoil, there’s the rapidly accelerating transition from iron to circuits, from hardware to software, from facilities to remote network connections. A couple of years ago, vendors on the floor at the NAB Show in Las Vegas were calling it “function collapse.” Today, it’s a race to recast oneself as software-defined network provider in one or another iteration. Manufactured, fabricated hardware is being displaced by coding.With that comes the reality that no two jobs will be the same.

The larger vendors are evolving through M&A and the ability to leverage an established customer base with which emerging technologies are being co-developed. Smaller vendors— entrepreneurial businesses so presumably beloved by the Washington bloviati—are employing the coping strategies at hand. One veteran, independent TV facility vendor put it plainly:

“For those of us who service the ‘linear’ broadcast industry, it’s like the classic vision of the guy hopping over the backs of alligators trying to get to the other side of the river.”

It’s a fair analogy if you add not feeding the gators for several days before throwing a bucket of fish in the middle of them.

Network neutrality is a solution without a problem, a debate of overly simplistic sloganeering and fueled by propaganda planted by digital behemoths like Google, Amazon, eBay and Facebook. But reality hardly matters. Somehow, Comcast charging Netflix for heavy traffic has been equated to the end of the Internet as we know it. There is absolutely zero evidence of this.

In fact, writes economist Tom Hazlett, “Networks routinely manage traffic and often bundle content with data transport precisely because such coordination produces superior service.”

So the Internet as we know it already has throttles If it didn’t, we’d all be knitting scarves while downloading SD episodes of “Fargo.” And now we’re expecting 4K content to be delivered online. Enforcing a hands-off policy on ISPs will surely motivate them to support that.

Now I am fully aware that as one of three citizens not on the payroll of an ISP who does not vigorously support network neutrality, I am setting myself up for pitchfork and torchery by its advocates. I’ve spoken up against it from the beginning, having witnessed Google literally start the whole mess. I also understand that net neutrality may be a fait accompli based on the steam-rolling momentum of Google-shaped public opinion.

I think this is unfortunate in the sense that rigorous analysis is being bypassed in favor of an emotional response.

I’ve seen nothing, for example, on the ramifications of regulating Internet service provision under Title II. What would the tax structure look like? Is this just a way for Google, et al, to get taxpayers to foot the bill for heavy traffic?

The other, perhaps far more relevant element to ISP regulation is that it hardly matters. The Internet itself is a frontier, as evidenced by the multiple sites that throttled the FCC itself after its circus of a vote on a net neutrality item.

Whatever Comcast, the FCC, et al, try to do to rein in the beast, someone is already coding a hack.

There’s innovation for you.

At least two people were physically dragged from the open public meeting of the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday. They were not threatening nor trespassing, but speaking up about something for which they clearly had great passion—a “free and open Internet.” The commission voted on a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to alter network neutrality rules, which the D.C. Court of Appeals tossed out in January to absolutely no one’s surprise given Verizon was the plaintiff.

Network neutrality has become one of the most divisive policy issues in modern culture, like communism in the ’50s. You either are, or not. There is no in-between. There is no compromise, no gray area. Network neutrality separates the public IP network from the bits it carries. It means content providers and users control the Internet, while ISPs maintain the network.

Whether or not that’s fair to the ISPs who invested in the networks—or even if purely impartial management is technically feasible—is not the issue for most people. There is a huge, collective fear issue at work with network neutrality. There is a fear that the Internet as we know it would go away, with its infinite well of cat comedy, MOOCs, the sublime creations of Marc Ten Bosch, and the great crowd-sourcing democratization of investment and philanthropy.

The assumption is that all these things and more would be altered or destroyed without network neutrality, as well as all the unforeseen wonders yet to be invented with a “free and open Internet,” the phrase invoked by one of the citizens* as she was dragged from the FCC public meeting.

That “free and open Internet” is actually a Google meme is but a sad footnote in this nearly decade-long conflict. The early stages involved Comcast and content pirates, who are thieves in goatees and therefore apparently folk heroes unless you’re an actor. (Whether or not Google dispatched the pirates is too farfetched to consider so we’ll pretend like I didn’t bring it up.) The bottom line here is that network neutrality started out as a war of titans and remains that way at the macro level. But these titans have now sufficiently thrown a scare into the populace such that its members lined the street in front of the FCC building and crowded the meeting room inside.

Now I’m going to throw in something that persons even a moment younger than me will not remember or perhaps believe. There really was a time in this country when public assembly and rational debate were civic duties. Issues of public interest were discussed and ultimately crafted in accordance to majority will, not merely the interest of those in charge of carrying out the decision. Democracy was a time-honored practice.

There is less respect now for democratic participation than there is disdain, a sort of condescending dismissal of the great unwashed by those in positions of authority. The publicly assembled have become the collectively disenfranchised, regarded with the same nictitating detachment as dissenters around the world living under regimes considered oppressive.

But where does one draw the line? It’s a good question. The commissioners have held public forums around the country on network neutrality. More than 20,000 comments have been filed in the commission’s database on the subject; possibly more, given that searches of the two net neutrality dockets retrieve the “10,000 most recent records.” Literally thousands of comments have been filed in the last few months. This electronic forum, one might think, is a virtual public assembly sufficient to serve that purpose, but protesters lining the sidewalk of one of the driest public agencies in D.C. suggests otherwise.

The public, in whose interest the FCC purports to act, is in adamant opposition to the commission’s direction on network neutrality. It’s a direction that frankly hasn’t even taken a form. It’s more like a gesture toward the far horizon; a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on letting ISPs charge more for data-heavy traffic.

“What we are dealing with today is a proposal not final rules. Nothing in this proposal authorizes paid prioritization,” FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler stressed after the sloganeering woman was hauled off by armed guards. He was visibly shaken, as well he should have been. The spectacle of people being dragged away from a public forum for voicing their opinion should make us all deeply uncomfortable. It suggests a fundamental breakdown of democracy, not so much because people should or should not have the right to speak during an FCC meeting, but that they felt so strongly about doing so that they risked the public humiliation of being physically restrained and thrown out.

It suggests a complete and utter failure on the part of the FCC to fully inform the public in a rational, contextual way, why ISPs want to charge a premium for the biggest bandwidth users and in what way this is justified. Far too often, FCC orders are packed with the type of promotional jargon once reserved for the most brazen of marketeers. The 2010 order opens thus:

“The commission takes an important step to preserve the Internet as an open platform for innovation, investment, job creation, economic growth, competition, and free expression.”

It lacks any mention of network management, which should be part of any discussion involving Internet regulation. The commission uses emotional language for its own ends, but rejects in-kind responses. If the agency’s revolving-door sovereignty could be a little less self-promotional and a little more devoted to ratiocination, they just might start to rebuild public confidence.

Unfortunately, Thursday’s FCC drama was no isolated phenomenon, but rather the logical result of a pattern of disregard for the public trust, which culminated with the appointment of a professional lobbyist to run the agency. That Chairman Wheeler once headed lobbies representing the interests of the nation’s largest ISPs is lost on absolutely no one in the free world. Whether or not he is capable of being a completely impartial chairman doesn’t matter. There is no way, ever—especially after the events of May 15, 2014—that he will be perceived as being objective and fair.

Unfortunately, everyone loses.


*Assumption based on speaking patterns.
��

TRANSPARENCY—The Aereo controversy is about many things. It’s about the use of language to manipulate public opinion. It’s about how the explosion of IP technology has left media law in the dust. It’s about the deterioration of ownership boundaries and the maturing public perception that all media content should be free in perpetuity.

What it is not about is technological innovation.

“Innovation” is the persecutory term of choice in Washington, D.C. Its usage seeped out of the Silicon Valley argot that condescends to anyone who doesn’t code, and makes billionaires of those who do, regardless of whose privacy and rights are violated. Opposing something that this anarchic core elite has deemed an “innovation” is like admitting ill will toward puppies.

“Innovation” is the key word employed in Aereo’s PR strategy. Aereo chief Chet Kanojia has used it like a hammer, along with the meme of consumer benevolence, since Aereo was announced.

“Innovations in technology over time, from digital signals to digital video recorders, have made access to television easier and better for consumers,” he said March 1, 2012, in response to the initial lawsuits filed by broadcasters that led to a review by the U.S. Supreme Court on April 22.

“The Aereo technology is functionally equivalent to a home antenna and DVR, but it is an innovation that provides convenience and ease to the consumer,” Kanojia said last December. Even the sentence structure here is contradictory. Aereo is something, but it is something else.

“The broadcasters’ positions in this case, if sustained, would impair cloud innovation,” he said in a more recent statement reflecting Aereo’s latest legal strategy of trying to frighten the judiciary into believing that if it takes down Aereo, it takes down the cloud.

So successful has Kanojia’s wordplay campaign been that his patois is parroted by the consumer press without question. E.g.:

“I had the privilege of spending a couple partial days with Kanojia, and meet some of the other people behind this innovative company,” Christine Lagorio-Chafkin wrote recently for Inc.

Aereo’s strategy of casting itself as a bootstrap upstart simply trying to friend consumers obscures the fact that it is backed by an e-commerce billionaire whose only interest in consumers is their routing numbers. It overlooks the reality that Aereo has been funded to the tune of $100 million and launched with every intention of getting sued by broadcasters, whose signals the service resells without permission.

Perhaps most effectively, it deflects attention away from Aereo’s use of junk science to circumvent copyright law.

This last point is pivotal. Aereo claims to have done something no other radio frequency engineer has ever achieved—to be able to pick up TV signals independently with dime-sized antennas stuffed into one large array. The first provisional patent application for this was filed in November of 2010, just 16 months before the service was launched.

That means that Mr. Kanojia and Joseph Thaddeus Lipowski achieved in less than two years what the combined minds of RCA Labs, Zenith and LG have never been able to do—create a TV antenna that is a tiny fraction of the size of the radio frequency wave it’s designed to receive, which does so discretely even while packed together with hundreds of others.

This presumed technological breakthrough is the foundation of Aereo’s legal defense. The legal precedent being employed here is the 2008 Cablevision case in which the cable operator’s remote DVR service was defined as one providing a “private performance,” and therefore not subject to copyright law.

Aereo claims to do the same thing by renting each of the tiny antennas to a specific user, who can then either watch live TV or access their own, digital copy of a program from cloud storage.

One inconsistency with Aereo’s use of the Cablevision precedent is that Cablevision pays retransmission and carriage fees for the initial signals. Aereo notably does not, and never so much as offered to negotiate for them. The other inconsistency is that the one-antenna-per-user model necessary for Aereo’s Cablevision defense defies physics according to every radio frequency engineer with whom I’ve spoken.

(Pete Putman provides an excellent illustration with “Deconstructing Aereo’s Patent.”) What Pete and his peers say is that Aereo’s arrays would have to act as one, large antenna that receives distinct TV signals and disseminates them to many people for a fee. This would make Aereo a multichannel video program distributor subject to copyright law, and by extension, retransmission consent:

“A multichannel video program distributor is an entity such as, but not limited to, a cable operator, a BRS/EBS provider, a direct broadcast satellite service, a television receive-only satellite program distributor, or a satellite master antenna television system operator, that makes available for purchase, by subscribers or customers, multiple channels of video programming.”

This one-to-many configuration comprises a “public performance,” and is therefore subject to Copyright Law. The point of whether or not Aereo is a cable system was brought up several times by the justices, who also pressed Aereo’s attorney David Frederick on the antenna design.

“There’s no technological reason for you to have 10,000 dime-sized antennae, other than to get around copyright law,” Chief Justice John Roberts said to Frederick.

Aereo has in fact slowly backed off of its initial insistence that each tiny antenna is assigned to an individual user. Now it’s just “some.”

“Some are statistically assigned to particular users,” Frederick said during the proceedings.

So then, some—not all, but some—users are each assigned a specific antenna, for an unspecified period of time, while others may use several over the course of a session or at any time, implying that the signals are being received over the entire field of the array, like a single antenna.

This means that Aereo could be found in violation of the Copyright Act simply because it fits the definition of a cable system, leaving the public-private performance question and the cloud out of it. And likely it would have been already in the lower courts had the plaintiff’s expert witness not phoned in his testimony.

The public perception that Aereo represents technological innovation that broadcasters are trying to quash out of greed is nothing but a successful public relations campaign, pure and simple. Otherwise, Aereo’s architects would have gladly demonstrated the technology to experienced RF engineers rather than blocking questions about the patent applications in lower court depositions. Applications that U.S. Magistrate Judge Henry Pitman referred to as consisting of Kanojia and Lipowski’s “own sworn statements.”

“Pitman also dismissed what he called the ‘rather odd argument’ that forcing the executives to testify about the patents in this copyright dispute ‘could later potentially be used in an entirely different context’ against them,” Courthouse News Service reported.

Unfortunately, the discovery obtained in that deposition is sealed.

I walked out of Tom Wheeler’s speech beside a broadcast attorney shaking his head, saying, “he seems so nice.” The FCC chairman had just delivered a keynote at the NAB Show, and in true-rock-star- rather-than-public-servant-fashion, he was whisked out of the room faster than a president under threat level whatever. Which was ironic, given his posture regarding this Administration’s crusade to kick broadcasters off the spectrum and further consolidate public airwaves.

“The FCC is simply carrying out the will of Congress,” he said. “There is no conspiracy.”

He’s just a guy doing a job. It’s not personal. Really. He even put money into broadcasting once; into mobile DTV. (Woops.)

Look, he said with the confidence of a man surrounded by no-neck dudes cleaning their fingernails with switchblades, the spectrum incentive auction is voluntary. Those orders to unbundle the retrans negotiations that cable operators requested and unwind joint service agreements? Forgot those came just four months into his tenure as chairman and slashed roughly 15 to 20 percent off broadcast stock values. Forget about how many of those he has up his sleeve in the next 14 months. This auction is voluntary, he tells ya!

There really wasn’t much new. It was the usual dual mélange about how much he loves broadcasters as first responders—air kiss air kiss—and how the fed is going to squeeze them off the spectrum anyway, because, well…

“Verizon and AT&T are exploring new lines of business based on broadcast LTE. Verizon paid $1 billion for NFL rights What does that tell you? They’re all embracing something that looks startlingly like what you do,” he said.

Except for that it will not be free to anyone, ever, anywhere. Two companies ultimately will own what once were considered public airwaves, and only those who pay them will have access. That leaves out a significant chunk of the voter base that typically rolls Democratic.

This is what’s meant by “the public interest.”

Just fyi.

ABOUT, FACE—The Federal Communications Commission has been allowing joint and shared service agreements for years. Now it’s suddenly affecting an about-face. On March 6, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler wrote in a blog post that joint service agreements would be attributable under ownership rules if one station accounted for at least 15 percent of the ad sales of another.

Four days later, the item appeared on the agenda for the commission’s March 31 general meeting. Two days after that, the head of the FCC’s Media Bureau sent out a notice that it was going to “apply careful scrutiny” to pending and future JSAs going forward because of “a concern that has arisen in our review of proposed transactions in recent months and years.”

Does that mean that the commission has handled JSAs improperly for years? If so, why is it suddenly qualified to do so now? Beyond that, what is the justification for ramming through JSA re-attribution in less than a month? And why now?

According to a February article in “The Wall Street Journal,” there are 128 JSAs in place across the country. The FCC hasn’t tracked them, so we can’t be sure where they are, but it’s safe to assume they’re in smaller markets. The presumed justification for unwinding these JSAs is that doing so is in the public interest, which also is the foundation of the commission’s media ownership rules.

The theory behind limiting TV media outlet ownership in a given market is that it promotes a diversity of opinions and news topic coverage. Whether or not this is a demonstrable reality, no one knows, and the commission apparently has no interest in finding out. It’s simply using the appearance of being a consolidation watchdog to drive more TV stations into the incentive auction.

The auction statute says broadcaster participation is “voluntary,” and not to be coerced. Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge.

TV is at a threshold of being an entirely different concept, with Comcast the likely impetus. It has to be. Its primary business is heading south.

The pay-TV exodus is establishing momentum. Last year was the first full year to yield an overall decline. It wasn’t much; about a quarter of a million. There are still more than 100 million households in the United States paying for TV. That’s out of 115.2 million total, according to U.S Census figures. Those last 15 million or so (depending on which D.C. lobby talks) haven’t, don’t and probably won’t pay for TV. Some live on reservations. Some are still reverberating from the Great Depression. Others still are too otherwise occupied to care.

So the provision of television content for money officially is no longer a growth business. The rope-in tactics of one-year rate discounts and bundling are not working any longer, especially since no one cares about VoIP enough to make it a revenue driver.

There’s only one path of least resistance for cable operators, and it’s broadband. Comcast already has 20.7 million broadband subscribers (out of 21.7 million total subscribers). Nearly 1.3 million signed up last year. It will have 30 million after the Time Warner Cable deal is done. If wired broadband is to become the future modality of TV delivery to the home—and it will unless legacy distribution goes on-demand in real time—Comcast will make it so. Dish, meanwhile, will take over out-of-home OTT delivery with aggressive moves in time- and place-shifting, and fixed wireless.

That leaves broadcasting. It’s clear the distribution side must evolve. Into what, remains to be seen, but it will have to be IP-based, simultaneously on-demand and live, with real-time, interactive metrics that can be used in a responsive production environment. In the meantime, the industry needs to continually hone and constantly improve the quality of its programming, which still dominates the market.

INCREDULOUS—What’s the point of Aereo?

If the technology works as Aereo claims, it’s worth a fortune in licensing fees. So why go a service-launch route?

It makes no sense.

I have yet to see analysis by an independent engineering team explaining how Aereo’s tiny antennas work individually rather than as a master antenna system, as many engineers tell me it would. This is the premise on which Aereo’s entire legal argument rests. Independent confirmation would dismantle the lawsuits. So why is Aereo not willing to subject the technology to independent analysis? Why not let the skeptics run a few tests? It would be cheaper than shoveling money at lawyers.

It also would be cheaper than offering Aereo as a service. Aereo’s storage and processing costs likely exceed the $8, 20-hour monthly subscription fee by as much as 60 percent. (Using storage cost figures made public by Aereo and Amazon’s on-demand processing fees.) Aereo may or may not do better than Amazon’s processing costs, but adding in infrastructure and marketing costs still begs the question: How is this making money?

Why not license it to programmers rather than go to such great lengths to circumvent copyright law? The cost to reach revenue from licensing would be a tiny fraction of constructing infrastructure on a market-by-market basis, as Aereo’s now doing. Aereo investors have thrown in to the tune of $59 million. “Investors” being namely Barry Diller, who’s current empire is built on Internet advertising. The bigger question than Aereo’s legality is its raison d’etre. I assure you that it ain’t about no poor, wretched consumer’s “right” to free TV, the very thing the wireless and consumer electronics lobbies are trying to do away with.

If nothing else, Aereo does shine a light on the gaping chasm that is content copyright law in the age of the Internet. The problem with that is no one knows how to bridge that gap or has the motivation to try. (Comments are not publishing properly, so I'll try to keep up by simply adding them to the bottom of this post, newest first. ~ DMc)

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Comments [sic]...
Deborah -- The reason Aereo won't allow its technology to be properly diligenced is that it wouldn't survive such a scrubbing. As described, Aereo has built a Faraday Cage (look it up)...the physics are inescapable. I know of no one who is suggesting that the broadcast networks are the "guys in the white hats" on this matter. They are every bit as greedy grubbers as Barry Diller. There ain't no "good guys" in this soap opera. It's copyright law that's at stake here - and that is very much worth the fight. And this law (the DMCA as it's now called) is not some flipping "black art" - it is only a "gaping chasm" for those who are willfully ignorant of understanding its structure and purposes. WTF does "bridge the gap" have to do with anything? You want the right to perform copyrighted works, you negotiate a license to do so. No rocket science, no brain surgery. Pay to play or go away. And Aereo's fatal problem is that it refused to pay!
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You're so right. As suggested some time ago, Barry has too much money and is bored. But what's wrong with throwing that money to lawyers? We're nice folks, too! In this case, I should note, I don't think there's even much of a "chasm" regarding copyright law. We'll see, but I don't think the Supreme Court will have too much trouble interpreting the current law as including obligations that Aereo says would close down its non-existent business plan.
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I agree with Ms. McAdams on the questionably profitable nature of the Aereo enterprise. However, it is my view that Aereo isn't REALLY suggesting that each individual subscriber has their own little antenna; rather, they are exploiting a hole in copyright law that permits them to argue that such a scheme is at least conceivable, even if not currently practicable with prevailing technology. Then, if the courts find that their method is legally permissible, they can seek more sophisticated methods of actually making sure that it can actually be done. If they didn't at least test the law, then their desire to create a system that really did give everyone their own little antenna (or whatever other methodology that now or in the future will be dreamed up) would be vitiated.
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Or Aereo wants to be the next Netflix, a ubiquitous product that lots of people want to pay for. With Moore's Law, what is breakeven or a little worse today can become enormously profitable in a few years, and economies of scale can only help.
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It is obvious there is a hidden agenda at work. This is being forced to be a success in spite of all the evidence to the opposite. The physics of the antenna just does work out to a single antenna per subscriber. The size is not even close to being an efficient antenna for the tv channels. True a piece of random length wire can be an antenna if flooded with enough signal. I am certain this is the case here. However, I want to see the one antenna disconnected and see that one subscribers tv set go dark. Will not happen. Why? Because the internet is NOT an RF distribution cable system. You can not pickup channel 2 on the antenna at a distant point and have the RF signal travel down the internet to the TV set and connect to the antenna jack on the TV set. It will not work. You need to receive the signal at the "head end" convert it to a stream of digits send the digits to computers that will allow it to stream in a new form on the internet, then a computer at the receiving end must connect to the sending computer, gather the digits from the sending computer and reassemble them into a video file that then can be converted to a video signal and then output to a screen/monitor. This will of course be of a lesser bandwidth than the original transmitted signal. I believe the copyright states that one is not allowed to distribute, modify or retransmit, in any form without permission. Here is a news flash for ya, taking a higher bandwidth signal, receiving it, demodulating it, converting it to a bit stream and then sending it out via an internet connection and for a profit, is in violation of ALL of these conditions, as it is a modification/conversion of the original signal, it is a redistribution of the original signal and these guys are making a revenue stream off of copyrighted material that has been paid for by the broadcaster for s specific market. For further reading on this one needs to go to this web address http://www.copyright.gov/docs/regstat61500.html This is not a new issue and was addressed by congress in 2000. or look here http://variety.com/2014/digital/news/why-a-loss-for-aereo-wouldnt-threaten-cloud-services-1201149611/ Aereo states the antennas are NOT dedicated to each subscriber. Respectfully Submitted By A Frozen Engineer
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You hit the nail square on. Like the Watergate conversation, "follow the money...".
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Could perhaps the point be to put thumbs on the scales of the TV stations as they weigh whether to keep their spectrum or fold and auction it? $59 mil ain't much in that context, right?
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Aereo's antennas may not have been subject to analysis by an independent engineering team, but they were subject to analysis by the plaintiffs. Plaintiffs attempted to challenge the independent functioning of the antennas in district court, and failed, ultimately not even bringing their expert to testify in the hearing, and dropping the issues. In fact, testimony indicated that signals received at the Aereo facility had 30 dB of headroom, and plaintiff's expert conceded that sufficient signal strength would overcome all the problems plaintiff's postulated might exist for small antennas. (Tough to imagine that 30 dB of headroom is sufficient signal strength.) Personally, I question the economics (and sensibility) of Aereo, also -- but your alternative suggestion makes no more sense. If Aereo's technology is uneconomic to operate, then it's worth pretty much nothing from a licensing standpoint. Furthermore, the big boys aren't going to adopt Aereo-style delivery anytime soon, because it's unquestionably uneconomic to adopt such for mass deployment. The economics are questionable for an OTT provider like Aereo. For a facilities-based provider, the economics aren't questionable, they're a complete non-starter for the foreseeable future. 3/27/2014
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I'm not sure the point of this opinion piece. The primary argument seems to be that Aereo hasn't every been independently tested and therefore must be acting as a master antenna. Except that Aereo WAS tested, repeatedly by the plaintiffs and the individual antennas were verified. This is such a non-starter that the plaintiffs dropped this line of argument after the first appeal. Further, the writer has little to no knowledge of cloud pricing. Amazon VM charges are very low and just got lower yesterday. Storage is dirty cheap these days too. More importantly, what difference does it make? Isn't that really Barry Dillers concern?

ENIGMA, MACH.—There are 1,784 TV full-power TV stations in the United States, one less than nearly five years ago. Let’s break it down to commercial stations: 1,388 as of Dec. 31, 2013, versus 1,395 in June of 2009. Seven less.

Everyone clearly wants in.

No, they do not. Why would they? The local TV business is surrounded by hostile forces. Flat ad revenues, digital encroachment, political black ops, outright piracy dressed as the Wizard of Oz, and a delivery spec so dated that vers. 2 is being skipped all together.

Much is made of the lack of new blood in television station ownership in the ongoing hand-wringing about diversity. Yet who would wish its difficulties on a new business owner? Broadcasting is not to be stepped into by any but the biggest, boldest and most lawyered up. Hence consolidation.

Everyone’s consolidating, but doing so incites far more objection when two TV stations in Peoria team up than when the two largest cable TV operators in the country merge. Comcast will agree to divest enough subscribers to gain antitrust compliance by dumping the lousiest systems making the least money. That’s just good business sense. The deal will move through D.C. with a requisite amount of grumbling. Far more scrutiny awaits two TV stations joining forces to save money.

Why? Is it because one is fraught with moral imperative but not the other?

Comcast is not entirely off the hook on the network neutrality. That crusade is memed “Internet freedom,” which would suggest a moral imperative were it not lobby-speak for “Google’s influence.” Maybe there is a moral imperative to govern Comcast’s control of its infrastructure. I don’t know. I’m not convinced anyone can say they do know. Do we consider uninterrupted video streaming a moral imperative?

If so, I humbly suggest we have bigger problems than network neutrality.

Local TV stations have what seems to be a more definite moral imperative to “serve the public interest, convenience and necessity,” through well-meaning but somewhat random operational requirements, like three hours of kids’ programming a day. Other TV station public interest requirements involve the provision of community information, clear sponsorship identification, access to airtime for political candidates, a concerted effort to keep smut off the air and a file keeping track of it all.

All these things certainly seem beneficial in some fashion, but how so in quantifiable terms? Has there ever been a formal analysis of the public interest benefits of three hours of children’s programming a day? Personally, I don’t remember ever seeing “Sesame Street.” Now “Dark Shadows,” that’s a different story. Does that count?

Sponsorship ID is pretty straight-forward. To be sure, journalistic operations should be the guardians of the bright line, but extreme revenue pressures and unscrupulous advertisers are blurring it. That’s not to excuse news operations for running ad fluff as editorial content. It’s simply a fact of life in today’s economic environment, as is consolidation in all its forms, including joint sales agreements and similar arrangements where one TV station sells ad time or fully manages another in the same market.

The Federal Communications Commission has allowed 256 TV stations to enter into JSAs, according to a February piece in The Wall Street Journal. The commission is now back-peddling. On March 12, somewhat late in the day, it released a statement from Bill Lake, chief of the FCC Media Bureau. I’m including it in its entirety because it reminded me a little of Marlon Brando petting a cat. Emphasis mine:

“The Media Bureau released today a Public Notice to give guidance to the industry about how the Bureau will process pending and future proposed broadcast television transactions. In the interest of transparency, we hope that all interested entities will find it helpful for us to identify publicly a concern that has arisen in our review of proposed transactions in recent months and years and that will enter into our future transaction reviews. That concern relates to the combination in a transaction of operational agreements of various types along with contingent financial interests or financing relationships.

“Where such a combination exists, we see a need to apply careful scrutiny to ensure that the transaction does not give one station an undue degree of operational and financial influence over the second station. We will need to ensure that the economic effects of, and incentives created by, the transaction are consistent with the public interest and our commission policies. This is not a change in our underlying rules or the policies on which they are based. But we owe it to the interested public to share our concern that such a combination of operational and financial relationships raises issues of consistency with our rules and policies, which will have to be considered carefully in our public interest review. Parties interested in simplifying the review of their transactions should be benefited by knowing of this concern as they structure their deals. Similarly, parties with pending applications proposing these types of combinations will have the opportunity to amend those applications, if they wish, to simplify the review process.”

Copy edited, the statement says, “look, even though we’ve approved of these deals for years, and we’re not changing the rules, per se, we’re changing how we apply them. But we’re not telling specifically how we’re going to apply them.”

The Public Notice was a follow-on to a blog post by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler suggesting one station generating 15 percent or more of another’s ad sales under a JSA should be attributable under revised ownership rules. The issue is on the commission’s March 31 agenda. Word on the street is that Wheeler has the votes. What this portends is a radical policy reversal orchestrated within a three-week window, without scrutiny, comment or any sort of evidence that unwinding JSAs is in “the public interest”—as the good chairman frequently exhorts in his post—nor how competition from digital and other platforms has promulgated JSAs.

A crackdown on JSAs is likely to force station divestitures in smaller markets and highly unlikely to serve the public interest in any way. The presumed point of “public interest” is more diversity and more local news. Stations under JSAs typically were not peak performers to begin with. It’s unrealistic to expect them to ramp up and report “more” local news on their own.

It’s more realistic to expect those stations to end up on the incentive auction block next year, which seems to be the point of the crackdown in the first place.

EVERYWHERE—This happened. Gmail went down for something like 10 minutes. I’ve been using Gmail since I can’t remember when. There are 13,879 emails saved in my account. Gmail has become the de facto searchable archive of my correspondence—and what essentially are my conversations— with colleagues, experts, friends and businesses. And by the looks of Twitter, I’m not alone.

I jumped in and tweeted “Gmail fail” wondering how widespread it was. It was widespread. At least 50 or so “gmail” tweets were being posted every 10–15 seconds. Probably more. There was a sudden shared atmosphere of addicts with nowhere else to turn, and it was noted with the world-weary irony normally reserved for journalists:

“Gmail falters. Tech world freaks.”

“Apparently Gmail has been down this afternoon, which explains why I haven’t answered the email you sent me three weeks ago.”

“So wait, are there any members of the free world who don’t have Gmail accounts these days?”

“CAMERA 1: Two people at desks. They rise, look at each other. ‘Much… talking.’ ‘Yes. So wow.’ ‘We rebuild.’ They hold hands. /scene.”

It goes on, presumably for a full 18 minutes in some areas. Long enough for Yahoo! to get in the Twitter feed and poke Google in the eye and run.

I both love and hate Google. It knows more about me than I do, and it’s given that information to people who used it to impel my elucidation about restraining orders. It wants to force me to use Google+, which I suppose they can do. It’s their platform, but still. Give me a finished product and established terms of use, please. Stop making a test monkey out of me.

Then again, I guess that pretty much sums up Google’s terms of use; that any minute, I could be locked out of a database containing years of correspondence.

Hopefully, the NSA can retrieve it for me.

IN FACT—I got an email from Preston Padden just before the Consumer Electronics Show, which editors are warned to refer to as “International CES,” because branding is now so pervasive that speaking plainly is mistaken for incomprehension.

Branding generally is part of a campaign to shape pubic perception, not merely opinion. An opinion is derived mental rigor applied to perceptions. One hopes.

So Mr. Padden, former president of ABC, picked up on something continuously repeated in the campaign to discredit broadcasters:

“On PBS ‘Communicators’ last weekend, CEA’s Gary Shapiro argued that TV broadcasters got their spectrum for free. In fact, 90 percent of today’s full power TV broadcasters bought their spectrum in a secondary marketplace that was supervised by the FCC, and a substantial percentage of the proceeds went to the IRS. For example, Disney paid $19 billion for ABC.

“Also of interest is that the cellular companies that are now AT&T and Verizon got their initial cellular spectrum for free and still have it. Similarly, DirectTV and Dish got their initial satellite spectrum for free.

“Later the FCC switched to lotteries and eventually auctions.”

Now Mr. Padden is not agenda-free. He’s working with broadcasters interested in selling their spectrum in next year’s incentive auction. Mr. Shapiro’s meme isn’t conducive to driving up bids. It is, however, in Mr. Shapiro’s members’ interest to drive down prices because they’ll be bidding.

See how that works? Of course you do.

Mr. Shapiro’s meme has been ear-worming the press since before the National Broadband Plan dropped in 2010, but that’s when it took on a whole new vigor. I asked Mr. Padden where he’s been.

“I was motivated to make these points by reading of the CEA president’s complaints that broadcasters got their spectrum for free. It is just not true for most of today’s TV broadcasters. Verizon, AT&T, Dish and DirecTV—all of whom did get free spectrum; in the case of Verizon and AT&T it was predecessor companies such as Nynex, Bell Atlantic and Southwestern Bell—[and] all are CEA members.”

COINCIDENCE—This will sound like a conspiracy theory, so let me just say that I find most conspiracy theories tedious and not contributive. Most would require tactical organizational skills that do not exist in Washington, D.C. There’s a boatload of shenanigans going on in D.C., to be sure, but no one’s keeping aliens prisoner outside of Roswell. I’m pretty confident on that one.

The unraveling of network neutrality is more of a shenanigan. It’s not an earth-shaker that the D.C. Court of Appeals bounced it back to the Federal Communications Commission. The court ruled that while the FCC has the authority to regulate broadband, it cannot impose network neutrality rules under the current classification of broadband as a Title I service under the 1996 Communications Act. Title I provides the FCC with “ancillary” jurisdiction over wired and wireless services; Title II provides more explicit authority.

Robert McDowell called it back in December of 2010, when the commission adopted a network neutrality order during his tenure there:

“The order claims that it does not attempt to classify broadband services as Title II common carrier services. Yet functionally, that is precisely what the majority is attempting to do to Title I information services, Title III licensed wireless services, and Title VI video services by subjecting them to nondiscrimination obligations in the absence of a congressional mandate. What we have before us today is a Title II Order dressed in a threadbare Title I disguise. Thankfully, the courts have seen this bait-and-switch maneuver by the FCC before, and they have struck it down each time.”

The court saw it in 2007 when the commission cited Comcast for throttling BitTorrent. Comcast sued in the D.C. Appeals Court and won on the same premise that network neutrality was struck down on last week.

“For a variety of substantive and procedural reasons, those provisions cannot support its exercise of ancillary authority over Comcast’s network management practices,” the court wrote in its April, 2010 decision. “We therefore grant Comcast’s petition for review and vacate the challenged order.”

To clarify, network neutrality rules prohibit Internet Service Providers like Comcast from fiddling with the bits that traverse the networks they paid to build and manage. I am not a fan of network neutrality in part for this very reason—it violates the Fifth Amendment, in my view.

It’s no different than buying farmland, building the infrastructure and having the government tell you what you can and cannot grow. Which—behold!—the government does, but under a subsidy program. So why not pay ISPs to abide by network neutrality? Because that would be as ridiculous as comparing U.S. broadband speeds to those of Korea or any other country with a tiny fraction of the landmass of the United States. I’ve commented on this absurdity before, but it continues to persist in what passes for the national dialog about broadband in this country. (Richard Bennett does a cogent takedown at High Tech Forum.)

The other reason I’m not all acolytic over network neutrality is because it presumes what I’m getting over the Internet isn’t already being controlled by the search engine of my choice. We’ll call it “Google.” Google is worth $390 billion precisely because it does control what I see on the Internet. How is that different from Comcast throttling BitTorrent streamers? It’s not, really, except that A) we’ve all tacitly accepted Google’s interference as a fact of life, and B) it’s virtually impossible for the average user to quantify Google’s impingement on users versus throttling by an ISP. To hold up network neutrality as a tenant of a “free and open Internet” is like complementing the naked emperor on his fine attire.

So where’s the conspiracy theory already? It goes like this. The FCC already was under pressure from Google and the file-sharing community to impose network neutrality when Comcast was caught throttling BitTorrent. Here’s Google’s Eric Schmidt in 2006:

“The Internet as we know it is facing a serious threat. There’s a debate heating up in Washington, D.C., on something called ‘net neutrality’—and it’s a debate that’s so important, Google is asking you to get involved. We’re asking you to take action to protect Internet freedom.”

Thus, “Internet freedom” already was established in the D.C. Lobbyist Lexicon when Comcast gifted its proponents. This all came about as a new Democratic Administration entered the scene with a goal to cover the country with the fastest broadband service on earth, upon which Google could do anything it wished.

The Obama Administration and Democrats in general pushed for network neutrality while the GOP railed against it. So the Administration came up with a broadband plan that promised to put several billion dollars in the Treasury for Congress to spend six or seven times. The plan involved taking 40 percent of the TV spectrum and selling it to wireless providers.

This plan, however, depended on the participation of the very ISPs who would be subject to network neutrality, particularly Verizon and AT&T, because they have all the money. Spectrum decked out in net neutrality regulations would attract less of it for Congress to have already spent.

So then you have an FCC caught in the crosshairs between Google and the major ISPs as well as an expectation from Congress to cough up $26 billion in spectrum auction proceeds. The agency had to do something, and it was becoming increasingly clear that it would not involve regulating broadband under Title II.

By May of 2010, more than 275 members of Congress from both sides of the aisle had “urged” then-FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski not to try it. This is more D.C. slang for, “we’ll reverse it so fast your head will spin.” This was due in part to the aforementioned spectrum auction proceeds, which Congress has spent at least once extending unemployment benefits. Never mind both the spectrum and the auction have yet to materialize.

Genachowski needed Google because none of the major ISPs were ever going to provide wireless broadband in the boonies, while Google was doing it with nascent white-space technology. He also needed Verizon and AT&T positioned for a pretend bidding war over spectrum so that whatever members of Congress remained alive by the time of the auction could crow about it. Crowing is of tantamount importance in Washington, D.C., and must never be underestimated.

The result was the 2010 network neutrality order that required “all broadband providers to publicly disclose network management practices, restrict broadband providers from blocking Internet content and applications, and bar fixed broadband providers from engaging in unreasonable discrimination in transmitting lawful network traffic.” It reflected the language of Title II, which authorizes the commission to compel Internet service free of “unjust or unreasonable discrimination in charges, practices, classifications, regulations, facilities or services.”

Title I service, meanwhile, can be regulated only “reasonably ancillary to the effective performance” of its responsibilities. Net neutrality applied under Title I would be a cinch for Verizon’s lawyers to overturn in court, which they did. It will now appear to hang in the balance while the new FCC chief, Tom Wheeler, decides his next move.

In the meantime, virtually everyone got what they wanted. The ISPs got out from under network neutrality and will be more likely to bid up spectrum for wireless broadband to the delight of Congress, while supporters can hope that Wheeler’s FCC will keep it alive.

Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

EVERYWHERE, MAN—LG will debut a 105-inch curved LCD 4KTV at CES in January, dwarfing the Samsung UN85S9 85- inch 3D/4KTV now available on Amazon for $39,997.99. The UN85S9 has been marked down by $5,002 since reviewer James O. Thach sold his daughter into white slavery to purchase one.

“I’ve never seen the world with such clarity,” he wrote.

In February, petite Hawaiian soul singer Bruno Mars will give the most vulgarity-free Super Bowl halftime performance in recent memory, nonetheless provoking a flood of complaints with the FCC because he did not send flowers.

In March, the National Association of Broadcasters will question the FCC’s authority to write software of any kind. The FCC will respond with TVStudy vers. 655.1.2.6.5.4.

At the NAB Show in April, Japan’s NHK contingent will demonstrate corporeal TV now that science has revealed that reality as we know it is a hologram.

By May, the price of the as-yet unpriced 105-inch LG LCD 4KTV will be slashed in half after the only person in the known galaxy able to buy one—Tony Stark—has done so.

In June, millions of Americans will once again exchange looks of mild confusion over the use of the term “football” to describe what is domestically known as “soccer.” By July, U.S. sports fans will have fallen into a mild funk over not being the cynosure of the sports universe, the U.S. men’s team being essentially an international roster. If they get past Germany, however… O_O

Congress will recess in August and relative peace will prevail throughout television punditry. Chaos will return in September as 435 U.S. Representatives and 33 U.S. Senators fight for their lavish lifestyles by casting aspersions in primetime TV spit fights that would be prohibited on any school playground.

Rob Ford will be re-elected mayor of Toronto in October on the platform of gang signs.

By November, the North American public will need a drink.

In December, Amanda Thach will return home in time for her dad to buy that reduced-priced LG 105-inch curved LCD 4KTV. She will not be amused.

But we will.

WELL — A U.S. broadcaster demonstrated over-the-air 4KTV distribution at CES in Las Vegas this week. I repeat, a U.S. broadcaster demonstrated over-the-air 4KTV distribution at CES in Las Vegas. It was done with an entirely different system than the one in place now, which was the point. Broadcasting is not only stuck with its 20-year-old technology standard, but also the regulatory constraints that dictate how the spectrum is used.

The regulations that severely limit creativity in the broadcast industry are from the post WWII-era, when spectrum was granted to licensees in return for certain services—just as wireless and satellite TV licenses. Those frequency grants have since been bought and sold such that 90 percent of the TV stations operating today paid for spectrum on the secondary market. Just like satellite TV and wireless providers, which have far more self-determination than broadcasting. Consequently, the broadcast industry is hostage to rules that push it toward obsolescence while being pronounced obsolete by the regulators keeping those rules in place.

This is to the free market what being in a headlock is to ballroom dancing.

Back to the demo. Sinclair leased a low-power station in Las Vegas to do a live 4K feed to the Samsung exhibit in the Las Vegas Convention Center. According to Sinclair’s Mark Aitken, engineers “spent an evening” converting the station to DVB-T2, the TV transmission standard employed in Europe. Using HEVC encoding, the team was able to transmit 4K content at about 27 Mbps, or roughly 30 percent more than the current U.S. broadcast infrastructure bit rate.

The point of doing a 4KTV broadcast wasn’t merely to demonstrate that 4KTV broadcasting can be done, even though all TVs will soon be 4K. The point of doing the 4KTV broadcast was to demonstrate what can be achieved through flexible use of a TV license with fewer regulatory constraints.

There is virtually no other way for broadcasters to “morph into new entities,” as FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler put it at CES. Wheeler contends that the spectrum incentive auction is the perfect opportunity for broadcasters to reinvent themselves. It’s also the perfect opportunity for the FCC to reinvent its broadcast regulations so the industry can move ahead and become part of a larger, all-encompassing information exchange system.

“Samsung had satellite, cable, broadcast and IP 4K,” Aitken said. “All of those are platforms that demonstrate the need for a hybrid broadcast platform, or a heterogeneous network… that allows all network-delivered bits to interoperate.”

A HetNet model frees device makers from accommodating various network standards and interfaces. It also frees the rest of us from two-year service contracts and platform siloes.

“The tablet, computer and Internet-aware side of the community is thinking about how to tie all of this content together,” Aitken said. “I think the carrier-device wall will be torn down like the Berlin Wall, driven by consumer desire for more control.”

Smartphones would be provider agnostic, like smart TVs. Users could pick and choose what content and whose service they want at any given time. Surely that’s a public interest lip-lock for the FCC. All it has to do is move aside and let the broadcast industry invent, and put an end to the propaganda that it cannot.

WHAT? — You tell me: What does a $150,000 TV set do that a $1,500 TV set doesn’t do? I don’t know. Maybe it relates to you; reads your mind, becomes the disembodied voice of Scarlett Johansson. Surely it microwaves your cells into tiny crisps. Samsung’s 110-inch LCD 4KTV was rolled out in South Korea this week with a price tag of 150 grand U.S. My first question is, “why?” And my second is, “when will it be listed on Amazon so the hilarious reviews can begin?”

As far as features are concerned, it appears to do what just about any other TV does, according to the 246 or so news sources that probably picked up the story from one another. The $150,000 Samsung S9110 displays TV shows. I don’t think the two young Korean ladies that always accompany a Samsung or LG TV debut come with the S9110 or even hand-deliver it, much less hold it up in your living room wearing evening gowns. That would at least explain the price.

Who will buy a $150,000 television set? People who hate their retinas and who love the men in their life and are Oprah Winfrey or the fictional character Tony Stark. But seriously, can you imagine Oprah watching herself on a 110-inch 4KTV? Celebrities will be replaced by avatars once they can no longer disguise that they actually look like the rest of us.

I’m just wondering how much it’s costing to FedEx that thing from Seoul to Las Vegas for CES next week. Amazon Free Shipping? I don’t think so. I hope it’s delivered to CES on a flying shag rug the size of a basketball court. That would spice up the Biggest Trade Shew in the Woild. How long, after all, can people stay agog at bigger and bigger TV sets with pictures so sharp, the detail is undetectable by the human eye? How long can people stay agog in general? I’m guessing a half-life of around three seconds. Enough to create a new Snapchat channel. (People being agog. I thought of that.)

I guarantee the press corps covering CES will file reports rife with agogativity because their buy-in is hugely important to TV manufacturers trying to recover from the digital and HDTV mass acquisition precipice. (When everyone in the United States went out the same year or so and bought a new TV set. And then they didn’t do it again, despite the overwhelming benefits offered by 3DTV.) And to get ahead of when Chinese manufacturers like TCL, which is offering a 50-inch 4KTV on Amazon for less than a grand, flood the U.S. market.

So for now, the only way left to sell TVs is to go bigger and more pixelier because you don’t need a new TV to hook your big screen up to the Internet. I predict the press corps agogification of bigger and sharper TVs will run its course at this CES. I predict a good deal of attention on what Chinese manufacturers bring to the table.

Sour apples, you say? Snarking because I don’t have $150,000 to spend on a TV set? Perhaps. Or perhaps I’d spend $150,000 large on an Aston Martin to win the love of someone who doesn’t deserve me and then get rid of it after I reject him. Or something equally constructive. Like putting the money in savings and buying the set with the accumulated interest a year from now when it costs $15,000. That, and a down payment on a house with a room big enough to put it in, with bouncers to manage the line of guys out the front door.

That much of a price drop may be optimistic, I admit. The 85-inch Samsung 4KTV introduced a year ago can be had (used) at a 22 percent discount off list (which Amazon says was $44,999.99, but was $39,999.99 all along on Samsung’s website. Because a penny is a closer on five-digit purchases.) The comparable LG 84LM9600 84-Inch Cinema 3D 4K Ultra HD 240Hz LED-LCD HDTV with Smart TV and Six Pairs of 3D Glasses … (big inhale)… is marked down just 15 percent, to $16,999, probably because of the six pairs of glasses. And Sony’s XBR-84X900 84-inch 4K Ultra Batcave Vision TV? It’s 25 grand like it was when Sony rolled it out last August. Boo-yah Sony. (Batcave Vision. I thought of that.)

Elsewhere, Samsung’s 65-inch 4KTV is listed at an alleged 47 percent discount at a measly $4,497.99. It’s like a sad cousin who lost their way after a brief bout of YouTube fame. I feel bad for it. Or is it badly?

Nada whole lot surprisingly, ordinary old HD 3DTV sets were the most deeply discounted—between around 25 to 30 percent in my pre-holiday Amazon push email. They’re now being packaged as add-ons to 4KTVs.

And finally, there are the OLED TVs. Ahh OLED. We hardly know ye. What are you again? Oh, right. Those paper-thin TVs with light-deprivation room blacks.

OLED TVs were introduced to the market Dec. 1, 2007 with the unveiling of Sony’s $2,500 11-inch XEL-1, a flat-screen resembling a computer monitor. The XEL-1 proved that anyone spending $2,500 for a TV at the time was not going to get an 11-inch computer monitor. Consumer reaction did not occur.

OLEDs are notoriously difficult to fabricate, which may be why Sony and Panasonic backed out of a joint production initiative. However, they are somewhat agog-worthy with their two-dimensional profiles and colors that stand out in a room and holler at you. LG and Samsung are staying in the OLED game with new curved screens that are kind of cool because they’re among the first concave TVs, but otherwise—TVs.

How much the new 4K OLEDs will debut for remains to be seen by me, but the $8,999 Samsung 55-inch curved OLED HDTV, introduced in August, has been slashed at Amazon to $8,997.99. (That is correct. $1.01.) LG’s 55-inch model, rolled out in July for $14,999, dropped a bit more to $10,999 on Amazon, and is now listed for $8,499.00.

At 8.5 grand a set, one could forego a single $150,000 monster Samsung and buy 16 of LG’s curved OLEDs and make de facto Surround TV—something simultaneously cool and horrifying and probably in the works. Let the gamers begin. And please call me if you buy the $150,000 Samsung 4K set. Really. I want to have a look at you.

SPINNING— Sometimes, when an idea gains momentum, there’s no stopping it, even to consider alternatives. This is particularly true when it’s repeated often enough and becomes a default reality. Lobbyists, politicians and businesses use the press to facilitate default realities. We, the press, dutifully comply. The Internet gives us a universal fire hose.

So it is, the idea that broadcast television is obsolete and should be eliminated has permeated the collective mindset, like Crocs or pet rocks. There is no discussion about what the country would look like without the medium that conveyed to nearly every man, woman and child in the country that President John F. Kennedy was felled by an assassin.

Even within the broadcast community, there are frustrated conversations in general agreement that broadcast has had its day. The exasperation is due in part to the discordant nature of the industry, comprised as it is of hundreds of businesses of every imaginable size, all competing among themselves. Getting them all on the same page at the same time is virtually impossible.

It doesn’t help that the ownership demographic is almost exclusively older, white and male, countervailing the medium’s public service justification in terms of diversity.

Broadcasting has a lot going against it right now, including its heavy reliance on retrans fees. Cable and satellite aren’t going to oppose spectrum reclamation, especially with cable shedding subscribers. All the traditional distribution networks are under pressure, not just broadcasting, which could but does not promote itself so as not to further irritate the pay providers, I’m told. Consequently, free, over-the-air TV’s kind of a secret, and that’s too bad, because when it goes, it’s gone. We will all be either at the mercy of one of two wireless providers, or in left the dark.

I hope the new FCC chairman has the gravitas to work for the public, and not simply as an industry shill. There are alternatives to the wholesale elimination of broadcasting, and these should be considered.

QUANTUM, ENTANGLEMENT — The era of the physical facility is rapidly evolving. I won’t use the term “declining” just yet, because ESPN has just built a new 193,000-square-foot facility in Bristol, Conn. This seems to counter a migration toward full virtualization, when the media “facility” as we once knew it becomes a tightly managed streams of electrons.

At the heart of this migration, I’m told, is the software-defined network. The SDN, as opposed to the current packet-switched network, is basically a “smart” infrastructure that can self-adjust to bandwidth demands. A software-defined network can configure and reconfigure itself, while packet-switched networks require manual intervention.

“The present environment is one where the network switches are tightly coupled to their internal control systems,” said Clyde Smith, senior vice president of New Technology at the Fox Network Center. “To provision a service that needs multiple protocols across many ports and through many individual switches is a very manual process where the operator configures the system, switch by switch. This means we need many staff members working in concert to rapidly provision or make changes.”

Whereas, with an SDN, “network topography and configuration can be constructed and ready for deployment in less than 15 minutes,” according to a white paper from Alcatel-Lucent.

Larry Kaplan goes deeper. Kaplan is founder of Software Defined Video Infrastructure, or SDVI Corp., a virtual media infrastructure startup in Menlo Park, Calif.

“The essence of a software-defined network is control and configuration of each data path in the IP network by an external application,” said Kaplan, who cofounded Omneon, which is now a part of Harmonic. “Today, this control and configuration is buried in the IP switch firmware. The SDN approach has very significant benefits including 1) extremely fast network reconfiguration on a path-by-path basis, so I could set up a 4K redundant path in near real time with something that looks like an Apple app.”

Further, Kaplan said, SDNs are basically data agnostic, so moving to higher resolution content such as HD to 4K to 8K and whatever comes after that, is a matter of using the network configuration app, for example.

What this all boils down to isn’t so much the end of the physical facility, though that is a potential outcome in theory. Certainly, the physical footprint can be reduced dramatically through virtualization. (Think of virtual set. There still has to be a place to hang the green screen.)

The greater promise of media facility virtualization is the ability not only to reconfigure networks on the fly, but to do so with cognitive automation that anticipates whatever new device, display size, flavor of operating system and distribution mode comes down the pike. The hundreds of new viewing platforms that cropped up in just the last few years alone have made content distribution more bespoke than prêt-à-porter, and media facilities already are challenged to meet the demand.

Fox’s Smith says the switch-based network infrastructure “simply will not scale in the future, and even worse, try to extend this model to remote private clouds—how many VLANs can you manage?—and in public clouds, it will not work at all.”

Antonio Liotta, professor of network engineering at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, makes a similar observation about the packet-switched infrastructure beyond the media facility.

“It’s already struggling to cope with the data being generated by ever-more-popular online activities, including video streaming, voice conferencing, and social gaming,” Liotta wrote in IEEE Spectrum. “Major Internet service providers around the world are now reporting global latencies greater than 120 milli­seconds, which is about as much as a VoIP connection can handle. Just imagine how slowly traffic would move if console gamers and cable television ­watchers, who now consume hundreds of exabytes of data off-line, suddenly migrated to cloud-based services.”

Within media facilities, the data explosion is being propelled by the demand for content to be delivered anytime anywhere, on anything. Nearly every screen type requires a level of customized data such that programs, which are actually files, each trail mini-files—in the form of metadata—like meteor dust. This file proliferation puts ever greater demands on networks that weren’t designed with such demands in mind.

E.g., one hour of uncompressed HD video is about 4.4 GB. An average “library” has between 1,000 to 2,000 such files, according to my server guy. Each of these files are made of “dozens to hundreds” of video and audio elements, each with metadata describing what it is, who shot it, where it goes in the edit sequence and so forth. Still more metadata describes the file size, type, format, length, where it’s stored, when it was created, when it was modified, etc. Further metadata is associated with rights management, scheduling, sales and tracking, for example. Different systems manage these different types of metadata, though not always in tandem, in which case, the library is closed.

Here’s Lieven Vermaele co-founder and CEO of SDNsquare, an IP-networking startup in Gent, Belgium. “I always had one problem when I worked in the media industry with VRT and then the EBU—routing was never optimal for media, and networks go down,” he told TVBEurope after IBC this year. “In the post environment, we had bigger files going round and the traditional answer of the industry was always over-provision. We have to get the jams away from media networks, and that is what we have done with the software-defined network.”

The question now revolves around the migration path from hardware and packet-switched networks to virtual machines and SDNs. The TV industry is almost universally dependent on SDI video over coax, which in turn is largely dependent on purpose-built hardware, my server guy tells me.

“Yet once you move away from SDI—which seems to be gradual but continuous—then you have no choice but to put this on a network,” he said. “Then, the ability to reconfigure a service, operation or subsystem rapidly in order to address the dynamics of a changing business need, policy or even ownership change… it should become much easier to do if you let SDN handle this instead of having to call the IT guy and remap a network from the physical layer standpoint.”

Virtualization. The next great Digital Transition.