Last February I wrote about the upcoming end to analog TV broadcasting in the United States. At 12:01 AM, Tuesday, February 17, 2009, analog TV broadcasting will be no more as the United States joins many other countries of the world in adopting an all digital broadcasting system.
As discussed in the previous column, many of us will not be affected even if we still are then using our existing analog TVs. The reason is that according to Nielsen Research, only about 20% of the households in the Cincinnati market require broadcast over-the air signals to watch TV; the other 80% use either cable, satellite or a combination of both. Since the cable and satellite set top boxes already convert digital signals so they can be viewed on analog TV sets, the fact that stations like CET will no longer be broadcasting in analog is irrelevant.
For those who want to stick to receiving signals over the air, Congress has developed a voucher program that will award two $40 vouchers to each household requesting them. The vouchers can be used to offset the cost of purchasing small digital converters that will receive digital over-the-air signals and convert them to analog signals that even your trusty old RCA with aluminum foil on the rabbit ears can handle. They are still working out the details for distributing these vouchers. I’ll be sure to let you know when an announcement is made.
Congress also has mandated that retailers make sure that anyone buying a new TV, no matter the size, has information about what kind of tuner is installed. If it has only an analog tuner, the set must have a label stating that it will no longer be able to receive over-the-air signals after February 17, 2009.
Recently I took a field trip to see how various retailers were handling this disclosure requirement. I browsed through some major “big box” stores. I was surprised by what I found, or I should say, what I didn’t find. Today, analog TV sets are as scarce as VHS machines. For example, a stroll through “Best Buy” found no analog TVs at all. Even the small inexpensive counter top sets had ATSC tuners built in. That means that they have digital tuners capable of receiving the digital broadcasts. They are not High Definition sets nor do they have wide screens, but they can receive all the broadcasted digital signals. The good news is that the price seems about the same as the analog-only sets of last year.
Seems like the “sky is falling” predictions that warned of millions of TV viewers would be looking at blank screens when they wake up on February 17, 2009 may be a bit over blown. I’ll keep you updated.
Monday, July 30, 2007
Broadband Adoption on the Rise 2007
Just as the development of the Interstate Highway system transcended its goal of providing efficient and rapid deployment of military resources throughout our vast country during the era of the “Great Red Menace,” the accelerated construction and use of high speed internet connections are also having a major impact on our society apart from merely providing some new technology. Today, the geographic and demographic development of our cities and suburbs can be directly attributed to the construction of super highways. So too, the availability of high speed internet access has changed the way we work, play and communicate. It took the better part of 50 years to complete the Interstate Highway System, the information super highway has take much less time.
Recently a major study by the Pew Foundation Internet & American Life Project, found that nearly half (47%) of all adult Americans now have a high-speed internet connection at home. The percentage of Americans with broadband at home has grown from 42% in early 2006 and 30% in early 2005. Among individuals who use the internet at home, 70% have a high-speed connection while 23% use dialup.
I found it interesting that the study showed strong growth in home broadband adoption from 2006 to 2007, namely:
• African Americans: 40% of now have broadband at home.
• Rural Americans: 31% of those living in rural areas have broadband at home.
• Low income households, that is, adults who report living in households with annual household incomes under $30,000 annually: 30% of those in this group report having broadband at home.
There are several reasons that broadband has taken off. Since colleges and universities where pioneers in establishing high speed networks on campus reaching not only into classrooms and laboratories but into residence halls and dorms, graduating students had little patience with slow dial up connections when they moved off campus. In many cases they were more interested in obtaining broadband than they were in subscribing to cable or satellite TV.
Another growing segment was made up of retired office workers who had robust connections to the internet at work. When they retired they were already very much wedded to using the internet to keep track of family and friends, do banking and investment tracking and other tasks that require high speed access.
In the recent past, hotels and motels hyped their swimming pool or cable TV. They now brag about the free high speed internet connections and WiFi.
Recently a major study by the Pew Foundation Internet & American Life Project, found that nearly half (47%) of all adult Americans now have a high-speed internet connection at home. The percentage of Americans with broadband at home has grown from 42% in early 2006 and 30% in early 2005. Among individuals who use the internet at home, 70% have a high-speed connection while 23% use dialup.
I found it interesting that the study showed strong growth in home broadband adoption from 2006 to 2007, namely:
• African Americans: 40% of now have broadband at home.
• Rural Americans: 31% of those living in rural areas have broadband at home.
• Low income households, that is, adults who report living in households with annual household incomes under $30,000 annually: 30% of those in this group report having broadband at home.
There are several reasons that broadband has taken off. Since colleges and universities where pioneers in establishing high speed networks on campus reaching not only into classrooms and laboratories but into residence halls and dorms, graduating students had little patience with slow dial up connections when they moved off campus. In many cases they were more interested in obtaining broadband than they were in subscribing to cable or satellite TV.
Another growing segment was made up of retired office workers who had robust connections to the internet at work. When they retired they were already very much wedded to using the internet to keep track of family and friends, do banking and investment tracking and other tasks that require high speed access.
In the recent past, hotels and motels hyped their swimming pool or cable TV. They now brag about the free high speed internet connections and WiFi.
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Data Storage Getting Cheaper
“640K ought to be enough for anybody.” This quote is attributed to Bill Gates, Microsoft Founder, when quizzed many years ago about the amount of memory that should be sufficient for computer users. The prediction by Gates, apocryphal or not, proved false as even the most inexpensive computers now come with several gigabytes (billions of bytes) of memory. Heck, the temperature control on your modern refrigerator has more memory than 640K.
Even more phenomenal is the plunging cost of data storage. Last year when my wife was heading on a trip, I picked up a few extra memory cards for her digital camera. When I looked for new 128 megabyte (128,000.000 byte) cards I could find none available. I was delighted to find 1 Gigabyte cards ( i.e. about 9X more capacity) for a fraction of the price we paid for the 128 Meg cards a year or so ago.
A recent advertising supplement from a local computer retailer has several memory cards and USB memory sticks for sale with 2 and 4 Gigabyte capacities for less then $20 each. Putting this in perspective, a 1 Gig card can hold the equivalent of more than 200 copies of the King James Version of the Bible. Remember the old 5 ½ inch floppy disks? It would take 14 disks to store the text of just one copy of the Bible.
So what does this mean? Well for certain, keeping photos and documents in digital form has never been cheaper or easier. That is both the good news and the bad news. Since it is no longer costly to keep stuff, we can easily begin to drown in too much stuff. Gone is the incentive to erase those out-of-focus pictures or that letter you sent to Shillito’s complaining about the malfunctioning Philco Transistor Radio you bought. Why keep that stuff? Because we can!
Seriously, this is a great time to consider using memory cards and USB memory sticks for long term storage. They are compact, rugged and they continue to be offered with more and more capacity.
Manufacturers claim that these memory devices will retain data for as long as 100 years. Few of us using them now will know if that proves to be the case. Since we are storing information in digital form on these devices, it will be relatively easy to move the data to another form of digital storage (when it is invented) without losing data integrity or quality.
Even more phenomenal is the plunging cost of data storage. Last year when my wife was heading on a trip, I picked up a few extra memory cards for her digital camera. When I looked for new 128 megabyte (128,000.000 byte) cards I could find none available. I was delighted to find 1 Gigabyte cards ( i.e. about 9X more capacity) for a fraction of the price we paid for the 128 Meg cards a year or so ago.
A recent advertising supplement from a local computer retailer has several memory cards and USB memory sticks for sale with 2 and 4 Gigabyte capacities for less then $20 each. Putting this in perspective, a 1 Gig card can hold the equivalent of more than 200 copies of the King James Version of the Bible. Remember the old 5 ½ inch floppy disks? It would take 14 disks to store the text of just one copy of the Bible.
So what does this mean? Well for certain, keeping photos and documents in digital form has never been cheaper or easier. That is both the good news and the bad news. Since it is no longer costly to keep stuff, we can easily begin to drown in too much stuff. Gone is the incentive to erase those out-of-focus pictures or that letter you sent to Shillito’s complaining about the malfunctioning Philco Transistor Radio you bought. Why keep that stuff? Because we can!
Seriously, this is a great time to consider using memory cards and USB memory sticks for long term storage. They are compact, rugged and they continue to be offered with more and more capacity.
Manufacturers claim that these memory devices will retain data for as long as 100 years. Few of us using them now will know if that proves to be the case. Since we are storing information in digital form on these devices, it will be relatively easy to move the data to another form of digital storage (when it is invented) without losing data integrity or quality.
Monday, July 16, 2007
High Tech Reaches the Two-wheel Set
I recently returned from a bicycle trip through Virginia and was surprised to see how electronic technology has permeated this seemingly low-tech industry. For sure, bikes have embraced space-age mechanical technology with frames built of high strength composites making them light and strong. That being the case, for years about the only electronic technology one would see among fellow riders was a speedometer. Things have changed big time.
Over the five days of my 300 plus mile trip, I saw several bikes equipped with GPS systems. These devices, about the size of a small cell phone have some powerful features. Instead of gathering speed information from your spinning wheel, it computes your speed using satellites. Why one needs to have that level of accuracy while peddling through Colonial Williamsburg is beyond me, but it is cool.
Using the GPS you can load in your planned daily route and the display will show you exactly where you are and how far it is to the next rest stop. Call me old fashioned, but when the heat index is hovering around 100 degrees, sometimes you just don’t want to know how far you have to go.
One other feature provided by the GPS is readout of your altitude. Again, my legs tell me that I am going up hill. Do I really need to quantify how much climbing I am doing?
Of course there were several riders carrying on phone conversations using
Bluetooth™ ear buds. It is somewhat disconcerting to ride up behind a solo cyclist who is babbling away with no one else in sight. Talking while riding a bike is as dangerous as driving a car under the influence of “Ma Bell.”
One of the great new beneficial technologies comes in lighting. Using LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes) instead of regular incandescent light bulbs, bicycle lights are now brighter and battery life is extended almost exponentially. I have a tail light on my bike that has used the same single AAA battery for more than a year and I am sure it has been on for more than 200 hours. Likewise I have an LED headlight that can be set to strobe. The bright white blinking light grabs the attention of drivers who might otherwise fail to see my bike coming.
I leave at the end of the month for another bicycle trip in Iowa. Who knows what I might see?
Over the five days of my 300 plus mile trip, I saw several bikes equipped with GPS systems. These devices, about the size of a small cell phone have some powerful features. Instead of gathering speed information from your spinning wheel, it computes your speed using satellites. Why one needs to have that level of accuracy while peddling through Colonial Williamsburg is beyond me, but it is cool.
Using the GPS you can load in your planned daily route and the display will show you exactly where you are and how far it is to the next rest stop. Call me old fashioned, but when the heat index is hovering around 100 degrees, sometimes you just don’t want to know how far you have to go.
One other feature provided by the GPS is readout of your altitude. Again, my legs tell me that I am going up hill. Do I really need to quantify how much climbing I am doing?
Of course there were several riders carrying on phone conversations using
Bluetooth™ ear buds. It is somewhat disconcerting to ride up behind a solo cyclist who is babbling away with no one else in sight. Talking while riding a bike is as dangerous as driving a car under the influence of “Ma Bell.”
One of the great new beneficial technologies comes in lighting. Using LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes) instead of regular incandescent light bulbs, bicycle lights are now brighter and battery life is extended almost exponentially. I have a tail light on my bike that has used the same single AAA battery for more than a year and I am sure it has been on for more than 200 hours. Likewise I have an LED headlight that can be set to strobe. The bright white blinking light grabs the attention of drivers who might otherwise fail to see my bike coming.
I leave at the end of the month for another bicycle trip in Iowa. Who knows what I might see?
Thursday, July 5, 2007
Watching TV without a TV v 2.2
Last week we looked at some of the videos that are available on-demand from CETconnect.org, the service of Cincinnati Public Television. This week let’s take a look as other websites that provide local video programming that you watch on your computer.
Most of the local commercial TV stations provide some video via the Internet. One of the first to get into the field was Channel 9, WCPO. (www.wcpo.com) Channel 9 offers all of their regular newscasts on line so if you missed the 11 PM news you can watch it the next morning on your computer. The videos are available for one week from the time they are first broadcast. If you grew up in Cincinnati you will enjoy watching some of the historical videos that have been placed on the site. There are some vintage “Uncle Al” shows and some newscasts from the 50s and 60s. “It’s eleven o’clock in the tri-state…”
WLWT, Channel 5 offers video on their web site. (www.channelcincinnati.com) While they do provide a brief on-line only video newscast, the offerings are a bit meager compared to other stations. They do have a display of the most popular videos making it easy to find an individual story or feature for that day.
WKRC, Channel 12 ( www.local12.com ) has several videos available coving local news stories as well as some historical materials. One of their experiments is “The Cooler” a fast paced daily quasi-news segment done in a hip format It is aimed at the young professional audience that is so elusive for local TV news programmers.
Over at Fox 19, (www.wxix.com) the station has a full complement of news stories similar to the other commercial stations. Fox 19 is also providing video content to a new online video service provided by Cincinnati Bell called Z-Street.
Z-Street is part of the phone company’s ZoomTown service ( www.zoomtown.com ) service. It is only a few months old and unlike the other sites discussed above, it solicits video from the users. Patterned on YouTube.com or Google Video, the videos are available for free viewing are quite divers. Some are entertaining, while others are just plain stupid. Essentially Z-Street is similar to YouTube ( www.YouTube.com ) with mostly local content.
Not only do the TV and Radio stations provide local video content, the Cincinnati Enquirer has equipped some of their reporters with small video cameras. The results have been interesting if a bit uneven in quality. ( www.enquirer.com )
Even the Cincinnati Opera ( www.cincinnatiopera.org ) is getting in on the act with video interviews with the featured singers of this season’s offerings.
Certainly watching TV on your computer has not yet replaced your traditional viewing. With advances in video quality and the availability of devices that will allow you to watch video from all sources (broadcast, cable, satellite and the Internet) on your regular TV set in the family room, the same blurring of the lines between broadcast and cable will happen between regular TV and the Internet TV.
Most of the local commercial TV stations provide some video via the Internet. One of the first to get into the field was Channel 9, WCPO. (www.wcpo.com) Channel 9 offers all of their regular newscasts on line so if you missed the 11 PM news you can watch it the next morning on your computer. The videos are available for one week from the time they are first broadcast. If you grew up in Cincinnati you will enjoy watching some of the historical videos that have been placed on the site. There are some vintage “Uncle Al” shows and some newscasts from the 50s and 60s. “It’s eleven o’clock in the tri-state…”
WLWT, Channel 5 offers video on their web site. (www.channelcincinnati.com) While they do provide a brief on-line only video newscast, the offerings are a bit meager compared to other stations. They do have a display of the most popular videos making it easy to find an individual story or feature for that day.
WKRC, Channel 12 ( www.local12.com ) has several videos available coving local news stories as well as some historical materials. One of their experiments is “The Cooler” a fast paced daily quasi-news segment done in a hip format It is aimed at the young professional audience that is so elusive for local TV news programmers.
Over at Fox 19, (www.wxix.com) the station has a full complement of news stories similar to the other commercial stations. Fox 19 is also providing video content to a new online video service provided by Cincinnati Bell called Z-Street.
Z-Street is part of the phone company’s ZoomTown service ( www.zoomtown.com ) service. It is only a few months old and unlike the other sites discussed above, it solicits video from the users. Patterned on YouTube.com or Google Video, the videos are available for free viewing are quite divers. Some are entertaining, while others are just plain stupid. Essentially Z-Street is similar to YouTube ( www.YouTube.com ) with mostly local content.
Not only do the TV and Radio stations provide local video content, the Cincinnati Enquirer has equipped some of their reporters with small video cameras. The results have been interesting if a bit uneven in quality. ( www.enquirer.com )
Even the Cincinnati Opera ( www.cincinnatiopera.org ) is getting in on the act with video interviews with the featured singers of this season’s offerings.
Certainly watching TV on your computer has not yet replaced your traditional viewing. With advances in video quality and the availability of devices that will allow you to watch video from all sources (broadcast, cable, satellite and the Internet) on your regular TV set in the family room, the same blurring of the lines between broadcast and cable will happen between regular TV and the Internet TV.
Monday, July 2, 2007
Watching TV without a TV
A whole new way of distributing video programming has really taken off. While internet video has been around for almost ten years, it has only been in the last year or so that it has really garnered the attention of a wide audience. There are several reasons for this phenomenon. For sure, the popularity of high speed internet connections to the home via the phone company or cable is a major factor. Also, computers themselves have been becoming more powerful and cheaper. The technology behind playing video on the internet has developed quickly making the jerky postage stamp size video displays on a web page a thing of the past.
Internet sites like YouTube.com or Google Video serve millions of viewers each day. While these sites get lots of attention in the media, in this week’s column and continuing next week, we’ll look at some local video sites that might be of interest to you. We will begin with some shameless promotion for one of my favorite sites, CETconnect.com. Operated by my employer, CET, Cincinnati’s Public Television, CETconnect.org has more than 800 videos available on-demand. Most of the content is local in nature.
While you can link to some popular PBS programs like the News Hour, the majority of titles are local in nature. For example, if you are interested in local business you can watch interviews with executives and pundits discussing what’s happening at corporations and small businesses throughout the tri-state.
If the arts are your thing you can find a variety of videos spotlighting the major arts organizations like the CSO, Opera and Ballet or some of the lesser known arts organizations. For example, right now you can get previews of the new Cincinnati Opera season. In the fall the CSO and Pops programs will be featured.
Several local organizations and institutions from the Art Museum to the Zoo regularly provide programming for CETconnect.org. Since it is updated daily you can find something new almost every time you visit. All programming that is not time sensitive is archived, so you can watch today programming that was first released last year.
Next week we will look at several other local video sites. For CETconnect.org and most others, all you need is a computer and high speed internet connection.
Internet sites like YouTube.com or Google Video serve millions of viewers each day. While these sites get lots of attention in the media, in this week’s column and continuing next week, we’ll look at some local video sites that might be of interest to you. We will begin with some shameless promotion for one of my favorite sites, CETconnect.com. Operated by my employer, CET, Cincinnati’s Public Television, CETconnect.org has more than 800 videos available on-demand. Most of the content is local in nature.
While you can link to some popular PBS programs like the News Hour, the majority of titles are local in nature. For example, if you are interested in local business you can watch interviews with executives and pundits discussing what’s happening at corporations and small businesses throughout the tri-state.
If the arts are your thing you can find a variety of videos spotlighting the major arts organizations like the CSO, Opera and Ballet or some of the lesser known arts organizations. For example, right now you can get previews of the new Cincinnati Opera season. In the fall the CSO and Pops programs will be featured.
Several local organizations and institutions from the Art Museum to the Zoo regularly provide programming for CETconnect.org. Since it is updated daily you can find something new almost every time you visit. All programming that is not time sensitive is archived, so you can watch today programming that was first released last year.
Next week we will look at several other local video sites. For CETconnect.org and most others, all you need is a computer and high speed internet connection.
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