As “branded content” continues its astonishing rise – almost every publisher of note is now putting together special online and/or print sections devoted to sponsor-aligned content – the rules of the game are anything but set.

But you could do worse than to look at ESPN The Magazine’s approach as a reasonable model for giving sponsors a cozy association with legitimate editorial while preserving old-school church/state boundaries. Read the rest of this entry »

Because what self-respecting media-technology writer doesn’t want to wax on about ironing clothes back in the day? From CED Magazine’s Memory Lane series.

At the start of the 20th century, life for many Americans was conducted in accepted symmetry, with common household tasks aligned by days. Mondays, for example, were for washing clothes – anybody could tell you that. The following day was devoted to a slavish battle known as “ironing,” a term owing to the cast iron flat boxes, heated by fire or charcoal, that homemakers used to smooth out clothes.

It was the Tuesday ritual that posed a tricky problem for Earl Richardson. Read the rest of this entry »

Riffing here about the good ol’ days of satellite video for CED Magazine.

On Dec. 13, 1975, RCA gave the cable industry a pre-Christmas gift to remember when the first of RCA’s Satcom series of geostationary satellites was launched by NASA from a Delta 3000 rocket.

Satcom 1 was to the cable programming industry what a Beverly Hills ZIP code is to an entertainment lawyer: the most desirable address anywhere. The satellite had 24 transponders, each of which could accommodate one 6 MHz television channel in Satcom 1’s pre-digital, pre-video compression era. With ground-based receiving dishes expensive and cable companies struggling to raise capital to build out their physical networks, being stingy was essential. Cable companies wanted as much programming as they could get from a single satellite so they could limit the number of expensive earth stations they’d have to buy. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a lot of foaming-at-the-mouth happening in the television business over the “second screen” phenomenon, which basically refers to the fact that lots of people are messing around with smartphones and tablets while watching TV. In a gleeful and unabashed manner that only happens when people sniff the scent of really easy money, TV network executives and app developers are running amuck on the Internet and at conferences describing a new golden era in which they effectively get to double their business because now there are two screens on which to get paid for placing content and advertising, not just one. It’s as if a benevolent bird of media paradise has dispensed from above a hot, steaming gift of such value and possibility that executives almost can’t believe their good fortune. Read the rest of this entry »

A fun online series I wrote for the Natl. Cable Telecommunications Association on how cable companies are working to make broadband Internet service more affordable and available to families everywhere.

My take on the beginnings of a revolution (or maybe just an evolution) in how we watch, interact with and talk about television. Written for the good folks at One Touch Intelligence. (Here’s the .pdf file)

If sarcasm is the refuge of the shallow mind, as Oscar Wilde famously declared…well then, he never faced down a deadline, I say. Here’s a take on the rising commercialization of live sports from ColoradoBIZ. And yes, it’s pretty much dripping in sarcasm.

Cowards, I say! The people who run the NBA are cowards! Took a perfectly good opportunity to slam-dunk an easy-money scheme and dropped it like a bad bounce pass. Where, oh where, is exploitative capitalism when you need it?

You probably heard. Before the season began, the NBA nixed a contemplated plan to festoon the uniforms of its teams with sponsored logos affixed as patches on the front sides of jerseys. Thus, the league summarily denied fans who have paid good money for courtside seats the chance to see what a Gatorade logo looks like when it’s slathered with armpit sweat. Read the rest of this entry »

Not everybody thought Netflix’s streaming video idea was a good one. In fact, almost nobody did. Here’s my compilation of why-it-will-never-workisms from CED Magazine.

It was only six years ago that Netflix, then known mainly as a mail-order distributor of DVD movies, launched a novel streaming video service it called, blandly enough, the “instant watching” feature. Read the rest of this entry »

Written in 2012 for Nationwide, this digest-sized guide to the ins, outs and stress points associated with long-term care is an eye-opener. Here’s the flip-book link.

From CED Magazine, a recollection of an inventive, ahead-of-its-time, and ultimately doomed attempt to marry cable television and video games.

If you played video games in the early 1990s, you probably remember them: Blanka, a green-skinned he-beast with comically inflated biceps, plucked from the jungles of Brazil. Guile, a U.S. special forces veteran with a razor-like haircut and an American flag tattooed defiantly on his shoulder. Chun-Li, a martial arts master bent on avenging the death of her father. And E. Honda, the giant sumo wrestler from China. They were characters in Capcom’s immensely popular Street Fighter II, the arcade and console game that catapulted the one-on-one fighter category to prominence.

In all, there were eight fighters to choose from, unless you happened to play the game using a cable-delivered video game service known as Sega Channel. Read the rest of this entry »