broadcasting

Snow's Better Than Nothing

Submitted by Aerial Antenna on Tue, 09/06/2011 - 21:38
neige-snow_image_1312979472043_eng.gif

I was sitting in the parking lot of IKEA the first time I heard the Government of Canada’s digital television transition advisory on my AM radio. Scripted to a bristling player piano score (perhaps the agency that produced the radio ad thought Canada was transitioning from silent pictures to talkies?), the spot advised listeners that over-the-air (OTA) television “snow” (aka analogue signals) would be “cleared” from Canada’s airwaves by August 31, 2011 so as to make way for digital television signals.

While last week’s switch from analogue to digital television could have been a welcomed change for OTA viewers (conservatively estimated to represent one million households) if it had been equitably executed, the benefits to be realized by the analogue television shut-off hasn't been shared with all Canadians. MP Charlie Angus said it best when he described Canada’s digital television transition as a “hodgepodge” effort.

Under Canada’s new two-tier OTA television broadcast system, viewers residing in cities of 300,000 or more (with some exceptions) are now able to pull in a dozen or so free to air Canadian digital television signals using a roof top antenna or a set of “rabbit ears” (provided they have a newer TV or a digital-to-analogue converter box).

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The Vancouver 2010 Olympics: The first games in the clouds

Submitted by jesse on Wed, 03/03/2010 - 08:34

photo by ecstaticist from flickr.com

The Vancouver 2010 Olympics were the first games that took place "in the cloud." While it would be too easy to say that they were "The Social Media Olympics", that does not describe the breadth and comprehensiveness by which technology dramatically changed the way everyone interacted with the games.

Social media is for many people already old news, and what's novel about these Olympics, what made it possible, was the pervasiveness of cloud computing, the concept that frees us from our personal computer, frees us from a single television channel, to be able to interact with the games anywhere, anytime, and anyway we choose.

There's really no division between official broadcaster and even official sponsors, the olympics are so transcendent they permeate our society for two weeks, kind of like a cloud.

One of the impacts of the rise of cloud computing is the dominance of real-time media. The way in which compelling moments flash through the cloud like lightning with echoes that roar like Thunder.

Sidney Crosby's gold medal winning goal was a great example of this. The moment the puck when into the net an electric current surged across the country (across the world) firing human bodies up with emotion. The thundering echo produced by this strike could be heard by those not directly connected.

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