The next few weeks are busy as your writer criss-crosses the globe to preach convergence and the general state of the online video market...

Berlin 29th August - IFA
I'll be speaking on the opening day of IFA, a large consumer electronics show also open to the public. The conference is called Connections and is organized by convergence and digital home specialists Parks Associates. I'll be speaking on the subject of 'Visual Networking - The Evolution of Social Networks'.

Seoul 2nd-4th September - BCWW
The Broadcast WorldWide Conference takes place in Korea and attracts media and content professionals from all over Asia. I'll be speaking on the subject of 'Winning Formula in the New Media Ecosystem' and I can't wait. Korea is huge in Citizen Journalism - OhMyNews was the world's first collaboratively written online newspaper.

Amsterdam 13th September - IBC
The International Broadcasting Convention is a big event on the broadcast industry calendar for people on the hardware side of Television.

New York 14th-19th September - Web 2.0 Expo NYC
The Web 2.0 Expo takes place in four cities this year - San Fran, New York, Berlin and Tokyo. I'll be heading to NY as part of a 40 strong party from the UK consisting of 20 UK startups (including WorldTV) for this UK Govt sponsored trade mission.

Posted by Alx Klive at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So I've been on a trip to the West Coast these past few days and it's been fun and productive and all that yoda. Some brilliant back to back meetings, a conference panel session which was great and, well that's enough talk about work.

What I do wanna scribe is some of the more unusual happenings, the peripheral jimjam that rounds out a mission like this, and makes it truly memorable.

I learned that Terminal 3 at Heathrow now has the world's largest outdoor smoking enclosure, flying via Vancouver to San Francisco has its visual eye candy - you seemingly pass right over the top of the world, and... (boring alert), doing so means you have to gather and re-check your luggage in Vancouver, which is of course a freakin' pain in the derriere.

I hooked up with my good friend Digby upon arrival Tuesday night in San Fran. Digby and I go way back and is one of those reliable friends you can always... er, rely on, even if he did once spoil a beautifully planned, cross-atlantic, supersonic visit to surprise my (now) wife. He's never heard the end of it of course and I don't apologise to him for bringing it up again.

Wednesday I found arguably the World's best breakfast eatery - a simply super place called Dottie's in San Francisco. I'd heard some hype about it and just as I was wondering how good one place's pancakes could really be over another, I took a bite and was propelled to pancake pandora. If you ever visit San Francisco, run, not walk, to Dottie's on Jones. Just beware you may have to wait in line. There is literally a queue of people waiting to get in, and you should bring something to read as I did. Not dissimilar then from the seemingly never ending queue all day long outside the Apple store in San Francisco with people lining up for the iPhone, which I can conveniently stalk from my hotel window.

After work I took advantage of my hotel's handy location (nice hotel btw - the Palomar) to venture over to the nearby mall where I learned that escalators can go round corners. Never seen that before. Heading up the escalators in Nordstrom's (a chi-chi department store) I actually got vertigo and I don't even suffer from such affliction. It's a heck of a long way down.

I'd ventured to the mall to deal with a silly mistake which was thinking that California is actually hot in summer. I'd come here without a jacket, and it turns out that while, yes it is true California is hot for the most part. San Francisco is not. You can travel 20 miles south from San Francisco to Silicon Valley, or north even, and the temperature is 20 degrees hotter. Who knew?

Duly kitted out in a new jacket and with some little threads bought for my little boy, I got a craving for a burger 'my way' and plonked myself down in my grease of choice - Kurger Bing. It never ceases to amaze me that they actually have security guards packing heat in a (not so) fast food restaurant, but guns are a way of life here of course, and it's hard to get the cat back in the bag right?

Thursday I was down in Silicon Valley doing work stuff and passing through or stopping off at some of those famous places in the tech scene - Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Menlo Park - I can't help but get a thrill when I'm in this area. It's awesome and inspiring...

Friday was my trip to LA, but not before an interesting discovery at the offices of Qik.com... a shrine to Yoda. In the video you can see a whole army of Yoda's waiting for the call up from George Lucas - you've never seen anything like it. Respect to the man responsible and stay tuned for some rather interesting potential Yoda happenings coming down the line - on WorldTV a Yoda story you will see...

That done and feeling the force, I levitated my way to LAX where I exercised my now routine routine of renting A RIDICULOUS CAR (see video). Yes at LA airport it is possible to truly live the Hollywood dream at remarkably minimal expense. $60 to rent a Ford Mustang Convertible for the day is crazy cheap, and frankly it made any other option... not an option. Screw the environment!

Driving my ridiculous car (pictured at top btw) at ridiculously slow speed through ridiculous LA traffic I got my first taste of Sirius satellite radio. To those of us living outside the US it may come as a surprise to learn that a huge number of Americans listen to radio from space. No it's not some cosmic echoes of Neil Armstrong's iconoclastic mutterings but a system that let's you receive over a hundred channels by subscription from a satellite. So there you have it. Forget AM, forget FM, microwaves from 20,000 miles up are the ticket. The channels are genrefied with no advertisements and there's a handy digital display of the name of the track you're listening to. I scanned the dial looking to find some decent house music and failed, but was surprised to find BBC Radio 1 transmitting live on the service from the UK. (I wonder how they dealt with the music licensing issues on that one?)

In the evening I ventured to the beach and came across a fancy car dealership where the prices just blew me away. Having enjoyed my day in a Ford Mustang I found myself oogling a 2006 model (pictured) going for just $13,000 with 30,000 miles on the clock and a full Lexus dealer warranty. In UK digits that's silly money and I'm now seriously considering shipping one to London if only to drive it for a few weeks then sell it.

A dinner meeting was in the offing and I found myself at a super fabbo restaurant on top of the Huntley Hotel in Santa Monica. The crowd was attractive, the food amazing, but what tickled me most was my discovery of arguably the 'world's best view from a public toilet'. Like most people I've been in a few stalls in my time, but never one like this. It was just as well I had a dinner companion otherwise I'd still be there, probably.

With dinner done and the view of that beach still fresh in my mind I was on my way back to LAX for the flight back to San Francisco. The roads were frustratingly slow again, but about 2 miles from the airport they opened out, and I found myself staring at a beguiling stretch of open, non-grid road. It was time to flex the muscles on my muscle car.. and boy did it move. Naturally it wasn't too long before I found myself staring in the rear view mirror at some flashing blue lights, and I was bemused to note a rather appropriate old school hip-hop track playing on my radio at the time. I decided to turn off the radio figuring the police might not like my particular choice of tune, pulled the car over and placed my hands on top of the windscreen. The officer who wanted to meet me was keen to see my licence which seemed like a reasonable request. It took him a second or two to take in the information, at which point he exclaimed - "Oh, you're a Tourist?! What am I supposed to do with that?!" It was at this point I knew I was in the clear...

He asked me if I knew the speed limit, I said "No". He asked me if I had seen the cop car in my mirror following me for the past mile and a half - I said "No". He asked me if I knew I was averaging 70mph in a 40mph zone - I said "really?". He told me there was bugger all he could do with my licence and started asking me about England instead. Being new best pals I couldn't help but level with him. "Can I be totally honest?" I said. "I just arrived in LA today and I couldn't believe I could rent a car like this for so little money". "Yes it is a nice car" he affirmed. I told him I'd been frustrated with the traffic all day and he agreed that LA traffic was really bad. I said "I finally found this stretch of road and..." "You wanted to have a bit of fun right?". "Exactly!" He smiled, nodded knowingly and wished me a nice flight. How good is that?!

So there you have it, a foreign driver's licence can indeed be a 'get out of jail free card' in certain climes. Just so long as you don't do anything too dodgy.

Just after all this I did have a bit of a scare at the airport as I realized I'd got my flight totally WRONG. I was booked on the last flight of the day and technically it was due to leave just as the LAPD officer and I were becoming best buddies. Seemingly I had my trio of luck going... the flight was delayed and an electric go cart driver appeared out of nowhere in the airport offering to take me where I wanted to go. That's never happened to me before, and after a mad dash through the airport on the electric cart, I made my flight with 30 seconds to spare.

That's all folks - San Francisco, Silicon Valley and La La Land. I have a couple more days here and intend to relax a bit and catch up on some of the Olympics. Then a flying visit to Toronto for a day before heading back to London.

Take care people.... and remember... be nice to cops! They're people too you know!!

Posted by Alx Klive at 10:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A revolution is quietly going on in the broadcast TV equipment industry and you'd be forgiven for not knowing anything about it. It's the remarkable move beyond High Definition video to ever increasing (and dizzying) resolutions.

While the rest of us are weighing up the pros and cons of upgrading our TV's to High Definition, and broadcasters are still struggling to upgrade their equipment to handle High Definition, companies that supply the TV industry with cameras are pushing ahead with remarkable innovations that have left cinematographers and directors like Steven Soderbergh and Peter Jackson in awe.

Your current TV set, assuming it's not high definition, has a resolution of 625 lines, or 525 if you're in North America. This means that 625 horizontal 'rows' are used to generate your picture. This is known in the trade as Standard Definition and, remarkably, has been the same system in use since World War 2.

Sixty odd years later we are finally seeing an upgrade to our TV's, and the new high definition sets feature 1080 lines of resolution, or approximately double what we had before. Because a TV has two dimensions, horizontal and vertical, and both of these have been increased by a factor of 2, this means that a high definition picture has approximately 4x the picture detail of a standard definition one. Just remember your area formulas back in school.

But what if I told you that a camera is currently being tested by the broadcaster NHK in Japan that has nearly 100x the picture detail of a standard definition TV?

So called Ultra High Definition TV has a resolution of 4320 lines and would mean you could have a TV set the size of your living room wall, with no less quality than a high definition set has now. This would make AT&T's current TV ad in the States, showing a man watching the outside world through his window (as if it were a TV), rather prescient.

But while NHK grapples with some rather (necessary by design) kludgy approaches to getting UHDTV to actually work, other companies are pushing on with higher than high definition resolutions and getting cameras out onto the market.

The leader in this field is a California based company called RED, who stunned the industry last year with the launch of a camera that has 4x the resolution of HD, yet is priced significantly lower than many professional HD cameras. The Red One costs around $17,000 and offers resolution of 4096 x 2304 pixels. Note that the smaller of these two numbers is the equivalent to the 'number of lines of resolution' figure used above. Now this may sound like a lot of money, but in the broadcast industry cameras typically cost $50,000 plus.

A new camera from RED called the Red Scarlet due in early 2009 is promising to offer almost the same resolution as the Red One, but at a cost of just $3000. All of a sudden, this means aspiring film makers and Directors will have access to technology they could never have dreamed of before.

You may ask... what is the point of having such a high resolution camera if we don't have the TV's to actually play it back on?

Well this is where the law of 'capture content at the highest resolution' comes into play. It was the same a few years back with sampling audio at ever increasing frequencies, and it's the same now with video. Basically there is an advantage to be had from capturing footage at a higher resolution and downsizing it much later once special effects and other changes have been applied. At the very least your footage is future-proofed for when much higher definition TV's become available in the future.

One problem it creates is a nightmare during post-production which is when you edit your soon-to-become blockbuster. Post production companies (who supply facilities for this kind of thing) are still reeling from the changes they've had to make to handle HD, as it has affected almost every piece of the rather expensive equipment they use. Cutting edge film-makers walking in off the street with footage shot on a Red One camera only create more problems that need to be solved, and push the data storage requirements for all this footage off the scale.

So what does it all mean for you and I?

Well the fact of the matter is that resolutions above High Definition and in particular Ultra High Definition are unlikely to appear in TV sets for at least a decade. It's taken 60 years to get us to make one upgrade and there are way too many parts of the puzzle that need to change for your purchase of an HD set to be in any way a mistake. But as we've seen with the ever increasing Megapixels arms race in digital cameras, the manufacturers are always looking for ways to tempt us to buy newer gear and now they seem to be turning their attention in this area to the poor souls who have to make purchasing decisions within the TV industry.

Update: I had the good fortune to be invited to a special demonstration of NHK's Ultra High Definition System put together in partnership with the BBC and Italian broadcaster RAI, and it was simply awesome!

Posted by Alx Klive at 10:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)