NAB Show – Review, part two

Clickford, Steven M.

One of the other discussions was using LTE to replace existing Electronic News Gathering technologies that are decades old. ENG for many years made it easier to do live shots from the field and feed stories into newsrooms. ENG was a very complex method. For many years it wasn’t just the transmission method of microwave dishes being pointed to receive antennas or satellite dishes pointing to the stars. Most of this technology was based on transmission not for reception so hearing “return” feeds from the station, the interruptible feedback the earpiece to ether hear intercom or live program  (known better as the IFB), and seeing yourself required at least multiple phone lines from the field, a commercial two way radio with the station side having one or two channels completely open to broadcast the non delay feed of their programs, etc.

Due to the relevance of high definition, tapeless newsgathering, and sometimes the complexity making it hard to do a live shot in tight quarters; some companies are pushing for the idea for local TV stations to use their existing radio signals and turning them into their own 4G networks.

Sometimes 4g means LTE or Long Term Evolution or WiMax. It almost functions like a Metro area network for WiFi from what I know from the outside. Basically existing radio dishes on the ENG vans and receive sites would not need to be replaced, but the boxes that tie them up would, so there really isn’t that much rip and replace like the other stuff that was preached in the show.

A lot of local TV stations producing content are using a boatload of civilian 4G networks from the mobile providers, and by using this method, the costs would go down and any control of latency could be done through both a management system and intelligence of the device and app. Essentially if you have too many live shots going on at once the system will ether pick priorities or make you wait. If you have say 4 live trucks and 1 chopper, and the system is designed to take up to 7, then you’re all good because this type of software is pretty beautiful.

Post NAB Show Commentary, part three

Clickford, Steven M.

On Sunday of the NAB Show, The Next Big California Shakeout was the subject using Metapub. While some claim that funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is funding Big Bird, Nova, Arthur, or All Things Considered, that is far from the fact. CPB funds smaller market stations whether it’s PBS or NPR stations.

The context for this was developing metadata for digital and traditional radio stations that use HD Radio or Radio Display Services. Currently many radio stations display mostly “static” information, such as talent, song information, and other information. Some vehicles with RDS encoders can match album IDs against what is being received, since RDS currently broadcasts text on on HD Radios.

The Metapub system is a real paradise for coding, since it uses XML and other technologies to pull information from the NPR hub.

This process changed last year using a new system called Radio DNS, that almost acts as an Electronic Programming Guide (you know like what you can retrieve on your set-top box or how the old Prevue Guide used to work) This process enables producers to push out little bits of information within 24 hours in advanceto poll the Metahub

On Monday, a very interesting subject of news gathering was discussed. The use of replacing your existing microwave Electronic News Gathering to build your own 4G network. How this works, from the speakers and from questions asked by yours truly is replacement of boxes in your ENG vehicles, choppers, and alike and certain radio equipment at the receiving sites, the studio to transmitter links or STLs and the equipment inside the station. Basically it uses the same radio spectrum but from what I know it’s basically being transmitted over IP.

Basically 4G is also known as Long Term Evolution or even better Wi Max. If you think of it in the simple context, WiMax is like a large scale WiFi and if you can build a strong internal WiFi then this is how WiMax/4G/LTE can be done.

Because it’s a data network, you can bundle other thing such as the IFB, the prompter, video and audio on the same channel. Traditionally most live trucks required seperate radios for IFB, return feed from the station (whether it was an open OTA feed on a two way radio; or a simple antenna receiving the station’s transmitter pictures or in some cases IFB signals are basically using “music on hold” from the station’s PBX system.) A lot of field cameras that are using Panasonic’s P2 camcorders are PCMCIA based cards to record uncompressed video. These same slots can support a modem and you can now do liveshots (albeit rough not be the be all, end all) on the camera. You also see better pictures (real HD video) from the field because reporters are uploading packages from USB enabled modems on edit notebooks that get fed via FTP drops over their IP network.

The latter two requires broadband mobile Internet. With this innovation, your mobile bills are cut suddenly using the same technology but you own it instead.

In one slide, CNN had replaced their DC ENG network with receivers at multiple locations but fed back to their base over fiver.

More stations are moving to IP and engineers are more savvy to IT according to these speakers. The concern of a completely IP based ENG operation could have unintended consequences. You could theoretically cram a bunch of  feeds more than the system could handle. However according to the folks that did their talk, automation and self intelligence can prevent too many feeds from jamming in if you had all six live trucks plus your copter coming in and the system being overloaded. One feed could take precedence if it went that far.

iPAWS was another interesting subject.

#Shift Happens or #Shift is Happening

Nice choice of words, Cisco!

On the Tuesday of the NAB Show, Cisco’s evangelist spoke for nearly 45 minutes speaking about the future (or the “shift”) to Software Defined Networking.

Post NAB Show Commentary, part four

Clickford, Steven M.

Grounding!

What a sexy subject!

Well it was. Compared to the virtualization, IP and IT gospel preached nearby, this had a standing corner only crowd.

https://twitter.com/ClickfordZone/status/855931385026027520

From a speaker in Florida known as the lighting capital of the world, he started to discuss a Florida emergency dispatch center that used an old Motorola radio system. The problem is if one part goes down, the entire system needed to be replaced., as a result the cost was nearly $100,000 with an insurance policy.

Of the recommendations:

  • racks – do not touch concrete (where water is)
  • The National Electrical Code is barely legal and it’s not good enough for data centers.
  • Telephone grounding – attach to electral service, nearest to the ground. Lighting travels down on telephone lines (not up.)
  • Be careful when bundling wires (cross contamation)
  • Bolt in circuit breakers, use double nuts and bolt washers
  • Do not daisy chain!

Most often, data centers are more prone due to the IT’s lack of electrical engineering, and their need to keep costs down, remember IT is profit center, not a division (Clickford’s words).

 

Is Software an Expense?

Clickford, Steven M.

They say software is the real beauty of technology. The inner technology is the most valuable in the field. While it’s cheaper for say a technology company to avoid producing too much hardware using off the shelf parts at a razor thin margin, the real question is can people really afford software, and why is that not a “commodity”? Is the inner beauty could very well be it’s own worst enemy?

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SOTD: Is Amazon overpriced?

Clickford, Steven M.
a one year chart of Amazon-dot-com taken from May 9th of 2017
From Bigcharts/MarketWatch.com

Part of a new series

Is Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) overpriced?

I am one of the biggest skeptics of this company. I feel like I’m stuck in 1998 all over again and basically this same question has been asked over and over like it was a startup: has Amazon truly made a “profit”?  Is the stock worth it’s actual value? Is robots and other distribution centers and very razor thin profit margins by selling everything for almost for free actually valuable? If some box store or mum and pop store who has been closed by this company, and if the numbers are not accurately reported; and the numbers aren’t reported accurately, then is Amazon liable for misleading the public for sketchy numbers? And is Amazon’s Web Services better known by it’s initials as AWS going bankrupt like what Cisco claimed last fall? And how come those numbers are vague?

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SOTD: Stock of the Day

Clickford, Steven M.

Today, I’m introducing a new feature. It’s called the Stock of the Day. It’s not because the markets are up, and everyone is flocking to it like a fashion statement. No I do this because I jumped on the bandwagon in 1999, but followed extensively till about the Financial Crisis.  I’ll post advice from someone who isn’t from the financial capital; and any advice I cannot be held liable. Do your own due diligence before acting.

Mother’s Day and Radical Feminism

Clickford, Steven M.

I thought I’d express some editorial not on the weekend of Mother’s Day because that would be insensitive.

From what I read a few years back the New York Post ran an editorial stating that the woman (I am forgetting the name) who came up with the day was not a mother and noticed years later that it was over commercialized. This is the classic example of the haves vs. the have-nots.  She wasn’t a mother but noticed from the outside looking in that they were undervalued. Till the days when Hallmark went overboard and made this almost a global holiday for that group.

It’s time to retire the day because afterall it’s commercialized instead. All we are doing is spoiling women for all the wrong reasons.

I still believe fathers are undervalued even more than mothers. I mean look at how Father’s Day always lands during graduation season. Do you think it was coincidence or something else? The cynic in me think’s its the latter not the former. Why would you cramp an appreciation day during a season that’s always going to reoccur, especially on the East Coast?

I mean if we celebrate Mother’s Day, then are we supporting the crazy mothers who write online diaries masqueraded as a “newspaper”? Where do we draw the line? Is it more than just supporting  “mothers”?

Some of this I think lands at radical feminism. This concept is well past “equal pay”, the “equal rights”, or destroying the “man’s world” work environment. I do not like how women are being marginalized; and many women are suppressed to believe in one man’s view or loose their jobs, I’m talking about CNN’s Alysn Camerotta (the only smart blond on the Fox News Channel till they let her go. A recent interview explained her bad experiences at FNC; which is very consistent to other complaints.) Other women in other fields have struggled as well. The radical feminism however, is more destructive than just trying to get the foot at the door because your t–s are in the way. No, its women trying to be like men to get at the door. The “I’m a woman hear me roar” is the most aggressive and even threatening. Men themselves who act like lions or wolves are just as bad. This is why IT departments need to be shut down and the arrogant and cocky IT guys should live in their almost deceased mother’s basement. (And collect state checks.)

I am not saying that women’s gender roles shouldn’t be redefined, it’s their attitude, arrogance, and mindset that is similar to why they hate men the first place; causing adverse effects that would make men go gynophobic or worse – hate them as well. By causing this synthetic hate, then you’re making feminism run out of control.

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Virtualization – How Much is Too Much App-fiying?

Clickford, Steven M.

I’ve pondered myself how much time, resources, and hardware (and if you’re an enterprise the cost of licenses and software that goes along) and when should I say “when” to virtualizing?

Typically virtualizing should stop if

  • If you have no secondary domain controllers, directory services or anything that requires authentication, in case something happens to the “hypervisor”
  • If the vendor says you can’t use such
  • If licensing is too cost prohibitive (most often licensing for virtualization has a different cost structure – and don’t tell me to go FOSS)
  •  If the operating system or software is dependent on external devices. Assuming you have a 1U rack server, you only have up to two PCI cards, and assuming you have just 2 to 4 USB ports that can be mounted to a specific virtual appliance, and also factoring in other dependencies like audio cards, FireWire cards or ports, etc.
  • MANAGEMENT: This for me is the dealbreaker when to stop virtualizing. Management workstations are essentially boxes that connect to say the VMware machines, your networking gear, your legacy PBX, and may also be a catch all machine to be a TFTP server to do upgrades, etc. In my environment, it’s currently virtualized, but given instabilities of the network sudden changes to the baremetal and what is on and what is off and what’s on that machine vs another, it may not be a bad idea to have it on it’s own box.

If you are a small workgroup, high end notebooks or decommissioned laptops that can support current operating systems that works in your setup could be a solution. I’ve done this with my mothers old Toshiba and ran Windows Server 2003 to work as a domain controller, plus DNS and DHCP on a sub PIII, and 256meg RAM. All MacBooks (not going to recommend PowerBooks or iBooks given it’s age for actual production use) can run OS X Server, and the more newer ones can run it’s daemon equivalent (the $19 copies) as well. As I would recommend, the daemons released after Lion, use with caution, reliability is only as good as your specs and ensuring your Mac is not being used as a primary desktop.

Virtualization is all the rage, it’s best to play it safe and not go too crazy.

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Content Neturality

Clickford, Steven M.

For so many years, the hoopla was the “evil” ISPs and how they have charged customers or throttled their Internet traffic because they are subsidizing big companies. The theoretical, but unconfirmed claim that “a future Facebook” cannot be created under the current climate of the free market system. Laws created by the Obama administration lead to a “Net Neutrality” regulations that the large Internet Service Providers had opposed to.

To make it simple, it would enable ISPs to not discriminate traffic, and allow people to use the Internet for whatever they wanted. Especially if the ISP is unable to handle the out of control nature since after all various apps use various “ports” (like pipe valves), and the Internet travels from one ISP to another (splitting valves) and most of the “speeds” the ISP touts is at the “last mile” (those metallic boxes with a power meter) that could range from five customers to over a hundred possibly sharing that same fiber optic link. It’s at this point where it converts to coaxial to your house. Since routers and switches are like computers moving files from one network to another; such anarchy could put the networks at risk for failure, crashes, etc.

This is an simplified definition.

But that is not the problem. The problem lies on the content providers. This includes social networks like Facebook, and social media sites like Facebook, Google’s YouTube, Twitter, Facebook’s Instagram, etc.

Creativity is at greater risk, not getting your download faster than you wished. Internet content companies have gotten to the point where they are a major media platform. As a result, these argumentatively newer mainstream media platforms is bound by the standards set by lawyers these days. Also these companies are picking and choosing who will be the next social media star.

YouTube has departed in so many ways away from their Broadcast Yourself  days. YouTube originally created in a Silicon Valley pizza shop, on the second floor, originally had webcam content from users. While some took advantage and exploited the ability to post old and vintage TV programs, and very frivolous clips like station IDs and promos – these were in the eyes of lawyers for at least a couple of years. Very early on, lawyers for CBS was very fixated on taking down a number of very whimsical promos from WCBS-TV in the mid 1970s, the WCBS-TV Celebrates New York campaign. (The cynical side of me thinks it wasn’t because of “infringements” but moreover that they were ordered by the suits to cover up better content unlike what airs on CBS 2 New York today.) Worse, Viacom, owned by the long time geriatric Summer Redstone, had not agreed to a license agreement about a decade ago and forced YouTube to remove any Viacom-owned content for a number of years.

Then came 2015 and 2016.

Copyright laws were changing for the worse; Happy Birthday is still copyrighted even though the original songwriters passed away many, many ages ago. Pandora was under pressure to pay more royalties, and with the advancements of artificial intelligence and algorithms brought new things to “content creators”. Content ID.

This means, that virtually any song that isn’t open sourced under Creative Commons or an actual public domain song can be used in multimedia in the social media world. For many years, YouTube and Facebook would remind users before uploading to not post “copyrighted” content; but a vast majority of decent users would use the “fair use” defense, if there is even such.

Facebook started to implement this last year and typically you get a cutesy statement of a failed upload stating that such work “that belongs to someone else”. And recently, Facebook even identifies the music. YouTube will now flag any audio it can figure out and ether ban it altogether by muting the audio (typically if it’s a Warner label); take away ad revenue on that particular video and the money goes to the artist/label (that’s fine), or depending on the country you live in, ban it by your IP address.

This makes the digital rights management the icing on the cake if you are a lazy executive in Hollywood, since Hollywood doesn’t want people to do anything but watch or listen to the work at home.

The original intent of copyright was to encourage creativity by building upon [within reason] with the intent to respect the artist. And this is where ASCAP and BMI is supposed to come in, but with the recent changes to a now global rights system, it may only be the third world where they could hear works, and the developing nations will be banned.

Hollywood likes to make movies targeting Wall Street or anything to do with capitalism, but their actions sure as hell make them do everything they condone in the film and TV space.

But far reaching copyright rules isn’t the only problem, it’s the simple idea to get “seen and heard”; it is very hard build a Facebook page and try to drill down on all the data to see who is following you, where they are, how they landed on you, what did they search,what did they click, etc. YouTube is a little easier, but still too many drill downs and really the app-y interface makes my life a living hell as my CPU cycles go through the roof. And the cynical side of me thinks this is by design to enable people who have such tolerance to non user friendly interfaces to engage.

Facebook requires you to have a mobile number to add a handle. So yet another company has a number more vulnerable to ID theft than say my Social Security number. YouTube is even worse, in order to have a handle in the URL, I have to have at least 100 followers, plus the very high resolution “channel art” (which is larger than a 1080p TV screen) and that’s hard to scale to see on a desktop.

Social media providers are using criteria to see who will make it or not. And for the people who are doing it out of their hearts, is more of “work” than for fun, because of the inabilities a user can enjoy, if the rules were not so stringed.

The most recent example was Eli the Computer Guy, once a platform to learn IT skills. Many of his early videos going as far back as 2009 (and I discovered him in 2012) on 60 minute lessons on the said subjects. But he was in some identity crisis in 2014/15, then evolved to doing live shows, then went into the wilderness, to suddenly in early 2017 doing “Geek Sexy News”. Apparently in some of his live shows, he talked about the Baltimore saga, and some thin skinned “special snowflake”-type must’ve hit the trigger. He is a very successful YouTuber, with millions of views and hundreds of thousands of followers. For someone so successful, one hit shouldn’t take him down right?

Wrong!

In many of his 2016 videos, he had stated that he had sudden “purge” of followers; had to contact Google Corporate to resolve a single video that caused his entire YouTube page to be flagged; to the point where he went back to civilian level, having 15 minute limits of what he could post. The “Geek Sexy News” is now a result to Google’s immaturity of dealing with a high profile YouTuber who is punished to someone like your’s truly, just another guy on the web. Now how is that fair for him? While Eli could move forward with his Geek Sexy News portal; how many others can successfully move away from the chains of Google?

The question is can you? Well if you hate YouTube and Facebook so much, can you legally build your own platform? Well that problem goes back to copyright laws, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act; and the egregious lawyers that are involved in “protecting” the brands of Facebook, Instagram and YouTube alike. If I built a Facebook from a decade ago (the days when the profiles and pages didn’t act like apps), I probably would be taken down, because even if I “reversed engineered” how a Facebook type of service works; that’s most likely a violation of copyright or Intellectual Property laws.

While these companies have given in to Big Hollywood, they themselves do not want to see people move from another service, a service where hey – someone could pay and help a startup be more valuable as opposed to just a single source revenue. Even better, let the users upgrade to being a customer and pay a fee to store more stuff and allow to use copyrighted content without them having to go through the struggles of getting an ASCAP license.

Even if I banded together and took an opportunity of a new startup, it most likely would get squashed – by the IP bullies out west for most likely “stealing an idea” even though the idea isn’t well documented to be “copyrighted”.

The content providers are having the control of what content can be posted, allowed, what people can or cannot say; what they can or cannot be allowed to do, etc. And if you thought the Time Warners and AT&Ts were bad, all they are trying to do is make a buck on their investments of their Layer 4 and 5 routers and switches from years ago.

Even eBay has gotten so far from reality. But that will be it’s own story for it’s own day.

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