From CED and the Memory Lane vaults, a look at a fateful 1982 boxing match and its impact on television technology.

Some of the signature developments in cable technology are intertwined, oddly enough, with memorable boxing matches. Topping the list, of course, was the 1975 “Thrilla in Manila” between the late Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali. That historic fight signaled the onset of the satellite communications era for cable and inspired entrepreneurs like Ted Turner to conceive a new framework for launching national TV networks.

But a hyped-up match seven years later also would come to herald a budding romance between cable technology and boxing. Read the rest of this entry »

Local commercials, that’s what. Here’s the latest from ZoneWire, the website for the local cable TV advertising biz.

Finally, some deserved recognition for the athleticism of tailgating. From ColoradoBiz.

We did not know this and you did not know this, but apparently tailgating is now a sport.

We know: It seems curious. An activity in which people festoon themselves with face paint and smear hot wing sauce over a good share of their jaws does not seem to meet the basic requirements of sport, which generally demands eye-hand coordination and occasional deep breaths of oxygen. Skeptics sniff that even golf or auto racing aren’t sports. Read the rest of this entry »

Various clips from CED Magazine’s “Live from the Show,” featuring yours truly, a microphone, a professional camera crew, and lots of studied nodding of the head.

From ColoradoBiz, circa 2007, I’m resurrecting this column that attempts to explain why there’s a giant rugby field in this odd little Denver offshoot.

Mike Dunafon has lived life every bit as large as his barrel-thick chest suggests: He’s an avowed libertarian who grew up working ranches, tried out for the Broncos in 1976 and 1977 after lettering four years at Northern Colorado, chilled out after a divorce sailing to the Virgin Islands, and once recruited strippers from Shotgun Willie’s to march around in their skivvies and register voters in a sort of comically ribald takeover of the Glendale city government.

But on this Wednesday evening in October, with his royal blue shirt streaked with sweat and his face pink from exertion, he’s just another guy with sore legs. Read the rest of this entry »

Subscriber counts have slipped backwards in time, as this Memory Lane column for CED points out.

1994, the year of NAFTA, Netscape and Nancy Kerrigan, was a trying time for the cable industry. Although revenue had swelled to $23 billion and deployment had reached 95 percent of U.S. homes, the mood was tense. Two mega-deals that were thought to portend a re-ordering of the telecommunications landscape – Bell Atlantic’s proposed acquisition of cable giant Tele-Communications Inc. and Southwestern Bell’s planned purchase of Cox Communications – had been scuttled, and cable stocks were in a serious funk. Read the rest of this entry »

This Memory Lane column from CED remembers an ahead-of-its time Internet movie service, and the guy who brought it to life.

Populating the annals of the digital media business are hundreds of individuals who were ahead of their time. They’re the early-stage impresarios and on-the-cusp dreamers who introduced grand ideas and evangelized categories before getting steamrolled by the realities of the day: limited technology footprints, a skeptical investment community or the inability to captivate mainstream consumers. Read the rest of this entry »

A look back at the start of telephone-line erosion, for CED Magazine. Is it a warning for today’s pay-TV category?

Parallel lines
By Stewart Schley
CED Magazine

Nobody paid much attention at the end of 2001 when the number of U.S. telephone lines in service declined for the first time since the Great Depression. According to an annual report published by the Federal Communications Commission, the number of lines edged down by 0.4 percent that year from 2000, representing a loss of 815,915 connections from a beginning base of 192 million. Slightly worse was the downturn recorded by Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers – the large regional telcos – which shed 4.1 percent of their lines that same year, losing more than 7 million. Read the rest of this entry »

Get this: A time-share arrangement for plush seats and personalized service at the local sports arena. In a lousy economy, it’s a concept that’s actually working. Here’s the SportsBIZ column from ColoradoBIZ magazine.

Brother, can you spare a luxury suite?
By Stewart Schley
ColoradoBIZ Magazine

We’re staring down the teeth of a double-dip, the market’s in tatters, and nearly one in 10 adults doesn’t have a job.

It’s a great time to be selling sports-venue luxury suites.

At least that’s what we’re hearing from Todd Lindenbaum, the president of a 4-year-old LoDo company that’s building a growth business from a category you might not associate with the new cultural embrace of austerity. Read the rest of this entry »

Retransmission consent, the federally conceived remedy that’s now roiling the television business, has its roots in a 1920s radio industry experiment, believe it or not. Here’s the CED Magazine Memory Lane column about it.

A precedent for consent
By Stewart Schley
CED Magazine

Almost as soon as a promising new medium for news and entertainment arrived in America’s cities many decades ago, entrepreneurs in rural communities began thinking of ways to extend its reach.

By transmitting a signal over a physical wire, they reasoned it would be possible to connect distant homes to the originating signal source, allowing them to take part in the new electronic media revolution sweeping the nation’s cities. Not only that, but by charging an ongoing fee for the connection, the pioneering businessmen figured they could earn a return on their investment and pay for the cost of maintaining the service they’d invented.

All of this is well known to students of cable television history, of course. Except that this story isn’t about cable television. It’s about radio. Read the rest of this entry »