The controversy arising from the mobile phone video of Saddam Hussein's execution (left) joins other recent unauthorized personal TV recordings like Michael Richards' night club act or the UCLA campus Tazering police to remind us that we're all on camera, just about all the time. Walk down the street in Manhattan, strip down at the gym or just sit quietly playing Freecell at your desk, cameras legit or illicit could be grabbing frames without your knowledge or agreement. Whether the video is legal in court or not, it might easily be humiliating, insulting or expensive. Big Brother has rules about what he can do with his government-shot video; Little Brother -- that's you and me -- can do whatever we can get away with.
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Pervasive Creation and Production in 2007
Since I started this blog two years ago, the five platforms of video -- Home TV, Office TV, Personal TV, Auto TV and Outdoor TV -- have exploded, with more screens popping up in more places every day. While Home TV, especially lily-guilding HDTV and the attention-sucking entertainment economy, gets a lot of press, the business and social impacts of new video and the various forms of mobile and outdoor TV have some more interesting implications for the way we'll live in the future. On the horizon for 2007 are more tools for creating, editing and distributing TV faster, easier and cheaper, and smarter systems for finding and grabbing what we want from the global video streams. Stay tuned!
--Jack Powers
TV Addicts: You ain't seen nothin' yet
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi ("chick-sent-me-high-yee") and
media studies professor Robert Kubey reported on people's reaction to
television in a 2002 article in Scientific American, Television Addiction is No Mere Metaphor (SciAm subscription required although it's posted elsewhere). Asking the question, "What is it about TV that has such a hold on us?" they note:
In part, the attraction seems to spring from our biological "orienting response" .... It is part of our evolutionary heritage, a built-in sensitivity to movement and potential predatory threats. Typical orienting reactions include dilation of the blood vessels to the brain, slowing of the heart, and constriction of blood vessels to major muscle groups. Alpha waves are blocked for a few seconds .... The brain focuses its attention on gathering more information while the rest of the body quiets.
Couch potato-ism is in our DNA. We're hypnotized by the colors and the movement, not necessarily the programming. The "formal" features of television -- quick edits, pans, zooms, transitions, unexpected audio -- activate the orienting response, whether we're watching Playhouse 90 or When Animals Attack.
Most research focuses on watching TV in a living room; most was done in the days of the single screen. As video pervades everyday life, our orienting response may get triggered during mobile phone calls, elevators rides, ATM withdrawals and drives down the digitally-signed highway. If TV is addictive, some people are going to want to control it, restrict it, even ban it all together.
Program note: We're preparing a briefing on anti-TV culture for a March edition of the Pervasive.TV Report newsletter. Sign up today.
Analog Cut-Off Date: 284 Million TVs Go Blank
DECEMBER 2006 UPDATE
Commenter Rachael Maloof thinks this discussion is bogus, that "the
only people who will be affected are people that still use antennae's
to get a signal." Well, yeah, but that's a lot of TV sets -- 15 million
-- and people are still buying soon-to-be-obsolete analog TVs without digital converter boxes this Christmas. Plus the 284 million existing sets won't be able to disconnect cable and get signals over-the-air. Columnist Michael Rogers at MSNBC points out that:
...85 percent of Americans now get all their television from cable or satellite providers, so for the most part the change-over won’t affect them. (A lot of those households, however, also have second and third sets in basements or bedrooms that do rely on over-the-air signals.) The real problem is the 15 million or so U.S. households whose only television service comes over the air. For these people, predominately lower-income and disproportionately black and Hispanic, the cut-off will be bad news indeed.
Democrats taking over in Congress don't like the current legislation's provision of $1.5 billion to subsidize converter boxes for the poor. In a post-election letter to the head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, they said:
"We continue to believe this plan is highly flawed and disadvantages the poor, the elderly, minority groups and those with multiple analog television sets in their homes," the letter, dated Wednesday, said.
They also wrote that the $5 million budgeted for outreach, to get the word out about the transition, is "woefully inadequate." The DTV transition date is still fixed, but there will no doubt be a lot of wheeling and dealing about who covers the costs.
======
ORIGINAL POST, JANUARY 2005
At a breakfast meeting yesterday moderated by ABC's Sam Donaldson (left), seven Congressmen and Senators discussed the U.S. government's plan to shut down a quarter of a billion TV sets on December 31, 2006 [... maybe].
As part of a 10 year-old plan to revise U.S. bandwidth usage, Congress decreed that U.S. television broadcasters would convert to digital transmission, in part to free up spectrum for wireless communications. Once the cut over to a digital signal was made -- once a station could show that 85% of its viewers take the digital signal -- analog transmission would be ended, plunging all the older, non-digital-ready sets into static.
Continue reading "Analog Cut-Off Date: 284 Million TVs Go Blank" »
Super Bowl Augmented Reality
I went to a Giants football game at Meadowlands Stadium this season, a guest at a luxury sky box on the 50 yard line. Outside on the field. a live football game was happening in real time; inside, in the dark windowless lobby of the sky box tier, dozens of fans were plopped in front of big screen TVs watching the network coverage of the game. For these viewers, the regular reality on the field couldn't compete with the enhanced reality on television with its expert commentators, up-close camera work, instant replays and virtual field markers.
Introduced by ESPN in 1998, the Emmy-award winning 1st & Ten yellow first down marker from SportVision is a standard part of televised football games. It's companions, a blue line-of-scrimmage marker and a red safe kick marker, are more recent introductions. The virtual lines seem to be painted or chalked onto the turf, behind players and underfoot, and they move as the game proceeds. (An excellent description of the technology and the process appears in HowStuffWorks including a link to a Stanford lecture by developer Stan Honey.)
Augmented reality -- adding data to video -- is very popular with sports viewers hungry for real time information. SportVision also draws graphics and stats onto fields and rinks, follows race cars around the track with live spec balloons, and replaces field-side painted advertising billboards with digital virtual signs sold separately for broadcast.
We've always known that what we see on television is not real, but for generations trained in video game environments the latest augmented developments provide a world that's better than real.
TV Addiction: You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi ("chick-sent-me-high-yee") and media studies professor Robert Kubey reported on people's reaction to television in a 2002 article in Scientific American, Television Addiction is No Mere Metaphor (SciAm subscription required although it's posted elsewhere). Asking the question, "What is it about TV that has such a hold on us?" they note:
In part, the attraction seems to spring from our biological "orienting response" .... It is part of our evolutionary heritage, a built-in sensitivity to movement and potential predatory threats. Typical orienting reactions include dilation of the blood vessels to the brain, slowing of the heart, and constriction of blood vessels to major muscle groups. Alpha waves are blocked for a few seconds .... The brain focuses its attention on gathering more information while the rest of the body quiets.
Couch potato-ism is in our DNA. We're hypnotized by the colors and the movement, not necessarily the programming. The "formal" features of television -- quick edits, pans, zooms, transitions, unexpected audio -- activate the orienting response, whether we're watching Playhouse 90 or When Animals Attack.
Most research focuses on watching TV in a living room; most was done in the days of the single screen. As video pervades everyday life, our orienting response may get triggered during mobile phone calls, elevators rides, ATM withdrawals and drives down the digitally-signed highway. If TV is addictive, some people are going to want to control it, restrict it, even ban it all together.
Program note: We're preparing a briefing on anti-TV culture for a March edition of the Pervasive.TV Report newsletter. Sign up today.
