Carl Weinschenk, Editor
It’s a pleasure to again be fully engaged with the cable industry after many years of sporadic coverage. Absolutely no industry is as fun and as quirky as cable, which has managed to maintain a small town feel even as it has grown into a huge metropolis.
This may not be the smoothest segueway, but it certainly is one that makes sense: This week, the SCTE announced that HBO and TBS have joined its standards setting program. The connection is that these two programmers – which join Discovery Communications in the initiative – are aware that technology and content are even more closely linked than they were in the past.
Today, operators and programmers have to do something that was unnecessary even a little while ago: They must format different versions of the same content for transmission over a variety of delivery media to a dizzying array of devices. Standard definition, high definition and 3D programming is sent via traditional connections, the Internet or wirelessly to a melting pot of smartphones, HD and 3D television sets and computers. The bottom line is that extra effort is required if content is to look and sound its best to all subscribers, no matter where they are or what device they are using.
The need to think about such things suggests how far telecommunications in general and the cable industry in particular have come. My first assignment for BGR is a feature on the Cable Show’s CableNET exhibit. There is no better way to get reacquainted with the industry’s technology. I had the opportunity to gather information and speak with about 10 companies.
One of these companies caught my eye both because of its pedigree and how it is addressing the issue described above. THX, which is debuting at the show, was founded in the 1980s by filmmaker George Lucas. He wanted a systematic way to match the audio and video in theatres to the vision of the folks who made the films being shown. The company continues down the same conceptual path: Its CableNET presentation focuses on the use of a programming stream’s metadata to customize the audio and video to the specific network and device a subscriber is using.
THX probably wouldn’t see opportunity in yesterday’s cable industry, nor would operators and programmers have seen much need for what it is doing. That says a lot about how radically things have changed.
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