Broadband Pioneer Makes Tracks With EMC As Core Info Infrastructure

EMC Corporation, the world's leading provider of enterprise storage systems, software, and services, today announced that North American DataCom, Inc. (OTC BB:NADA and www.nadata.com), a developer of broadband and fiber optic networks, has selected EMC Enterprise Storage systems and software as the nucleus of a leading-edge information infrastructure. The EMC E-Infostructure will serve as the foundation for North American DataCom's high-speed and scalable data storage, Internet access, and telecommunications network services.

"Our investment in a new EMC infrastructure is central to our transformation from an Internet access provider to a broad-based supplier of cutting-edge telecommunications and computing services," said Robert Roy Crawford, President of North American DataCom. "As the critical underpinning of our new infrastructure, EMC's advanced storage and software enable us to rapidly scale-up and adapt our business to address new markets and customers with instant and reliable information access."

To bring high-speed network bandwidth to its customers, North American DataCom is laying fiber optic cable along thousands of miles of railroad tracks in the U.S.

"We're doing for the information revolution what railroads did for the industrial revolution," commented Crawford. "But, instead of moving tons per mile, we're moving terabytes per second. We are marrying our pioneering technology in broadband networks with EMC's Enterprise Storage to provide our customers with exceptionally well-protected and high-speed access to their mission-critical information."

North American DataCom will offer its customers remotely mirrored data storage services using EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) software. Said Crawford, "EMC's SRDF software and Symmetrix storage provide our customers with a cost-efficient way to remotely mirror their mission-critical data resources. With EMC, our customers gain access to the world's most sophisticated data protection technology and avoid the expense and associated headaches of operating their own backup or disaster recovery facilities."

Based in Iuka, Mississippi, North American DataCom will use other EMC software to derive significantly more value from its infrastructure. Said Ted Roberts, North American DataCom's Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, "EMC ControlCenter's centralized management capability will automatically identify problems and ensure uninterrupted availability of our customer services. And EMC PowerPath software will allow us to take information availability one step further through automatic load balancing, which will insulate our customers from peak demand periods or any other unexpected bottlenecks."

Michael Ruffolo, EMC's Executive Vice President, Global Sales, Service and Marketing, said, "Rapid, efficient, and secure information access is the cornerstone of success for today's wired enterprises. North American Datacom's decision to center its business infrastructure around EMC assures that it will be able to fully seize the opportunities presented by the fast-moving and burgeoning broadband market."

EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is the world leader in information storage systems, software, networks and services, providing the information infrastructure for a connected world. Information about EMC's products and services can be found at http://www.emc.com.

EMC and Symmetrix are registered trademarks and EMC Enterprise Storage, Symmetrix Remote Data Facility, ControlCenter and PowerPath are trademarks of EMC Corporation. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Digital Satellite TV - End of Analog Television

That is not to say that there are not any other online retailers of digital satellite TV services; it is just that there is very little choice in type of services being offered and most of these providers only differ from one another in their marketing and promotional offers, and nothing else. This is certainly a big constraint given the fact that watching digital satellite TV will only be enjoyable if there are more than a few options to choose from.

Digital satellite TV represents a quantum leap in quality over the traditional analog TVs that for long were the only types of television sets available on the market. However, even if you have bought a satellite TV you will still need to ensure that the set that you purchased must be able to handle the kind of resolution required to get the most out of your service.

In addition, you will also require buying a satellite television system that consists of a receiver as well as satellite dish and which is essential to enjoying your channels. Besides improvement in quality of pictures that a digital TV provides you, you are also sure to get more choice in regard to larger selection of television channels as compared to what is available with analog television sets.

However, not everything about watching satellite TV is hunky-dory as there is a minor downside to contend with, especially in that bad weather conditions which will cause severe disturbance to your viewing because strong winds or even storms can sever your television connection and then all that you will see on your television screen would be fuzzy pictures or no pictures at all.

Other than this minor hiccup, a digital satellite TV outpoints the analog television set on all counts and that is why people have given up buying analog television sets. Furthermore, if you are keen on watching premium or even pay-per-view television broadcasts you will also need to buy a digital TV descrambler.

The current popularity of the digital satellite TV makes it almost impossible not to also buy one for your television viewing; and, if you have teenagers in your home you would have no option but to accede to their demands for a digital satellite TV without which they would not be able to their favorite television channels.

Satellite TV

Satellite television is the fastest growing programming provider in the country. While it's becoming quite popular many people don't have a clear understanding of how it works or why they need it. Satellite television uses satellites that orbit the earth to send programming signals to customers. The satellite providers use their own satellites that are capable of providing multiple channels at a time. The signals are sent from the satellite provider station to the satellite in space. The satellite then can redirect the signals to earth. The satellites must be set up to allow for consistent signals to earth.

Satellite signals are scrambled signals that require special decoding in order to be viewed. The signals go through the air and are captured by a customer's satellite dish. Today's satellite dishes are small and compact compared to those of even several years ago. Contrary to popular belief the satellite dish doesn't need to be turned or adjusted once it is in place. This is due to more sophisticated signaling. It's best to have your satellite installed professionally. The satellite company often provides expert installation at a reduced rate and sometimes even for free.

Satellite requires a receiver unit. The satellite dish is hooked up to the receiver via a cable that is run into the home. The receiver is placed next to the television set. The installer will hook up the television as well as any other devices you may have such as a DVD or VCR player. More than one television can be hooked up to the satellite dish allowing different programs to be watched at the same time.

The receiver unit may also be a DVR, digital recording device. The DVR allows you to rewind and pause live television, view more than one program at once and most importantly lets you quickly and easily record programs. The DVR records programs with a simple touch of the remote. The programs are recorded on the hard drive of the unit, which can store many hours of shows. Simple commands let you record all episodes of your favorite shows for later viewing.

The receiver provides updated programming so that you can see what is scheduled on the stations that you receive. You can choose the program package that suits you the best. There are typically several options to pick from. Basic satellite programming gives you the least amount of channels. Family programming usually gives the best selections. Deluxe programming gives you access to almost all the stations available. You can also add on to the programming. For example local channels aren't usually included in standard packages. You can add local channels for a small monthly fee.

You can also add other specialized programming to your Direct TV packages. Premium movie channels are some of the most common types of additional programming that you can add. Sports enthusiasts will enjoy special sports channel programming that gives access to many more sports at all times of the day and night. You can also access pay-per-view programming and the costs will be conveniently added to your monthly bill. Get the best options and deals for Satellite TV with Direct TV, the leader in the industry.

Connecting Computers to TVs Wirelessly

As an alternative to using cables, you can also use Wi-Fi to connect computers and TVs wirelessly. Because televisions do not ordinarily support Wi-Fi, you will need to install a separate unit between the computer and TV. One common solution is called a Wireless PC to TV system or [i[Digital Media Receiver. These products connect via AV cable to the TV and supply Wi-Fi connections to any computer in the home.
Another wireless PC to TV connectivity option is based on Windows Media Center Edition (MCE). If you purchase a Windows XP or Windows Vista PC with the MCE application included, this system contains built in wireless connectivity support for streaming images to your television. Some of these systems also support TV tuner cards that allow your computer to receive incoming television signals. Finally, you can extend the capability of a Media Center PC across an entire wireless home network by installing a Media Center Extender product like the LInksys DMA2100.

Connecting Computers to TVs With Wires

Televisions do not normally support Ethernet cable connections. Instead, you will typically connect your laptop or desktop PC to a TV using one of the following types of audio-visual (AV) cables:


- S-Video
- HDMI
- DVI or HDMI-to-DVI
- VGA
- Any of the above - to-SCART (in Europe


A scan converter is a device that translates the computer's video signal into standard TV formats. You may need to set up a scan converter to connect your computer and TV if, between them, the two do not support any compatible combination of AV cable technologies listed above. Newer televisions, however, generally support multiple types of digital inputs, and finding the right cable should not be too difficult.

Watching TV on the Computer

You may also be interested in watching television programs on a computer. This is also possible with the right wired or wireless equipment installed. Some TV broadcasts are accessible directly via the Internet and no connection to a television is required. Those who own Digital Video Recorders (DVR) may also prefer to connect their computer to the DVR rather than the television directly.

Displaying Digital Images on The TV

With a digital camera or video recorder, you can create multimedia image files stored on your PCs. Showing these images to others can be inconvenient, however, especially if your computer screen is small and located in a private room of the house. Displaying them on a television usually allows you to show them at a larger size and in a more comfortable location. You can connect a computer to a TV either wirelessly or with cables. The best method to choose depends on the types of connections your TV supports as well as your budget for purchasing additional hardware.

Hall Of Shame

We live in an age where the ability to use video effectively on the web has long been proven.

So,I hope other readers of this blog will join in to add those sites who should know better. That is, websites that could easily make an effort and add a decent video service rather than stick up any old rubbish.

Let me start with the twitters at the RSPB for their truly dreadful offering.

Buying Patterns

I had an interesting discussion today about the various online purchasing matrices:

Research online, buy online

Research online, buy offline

Research offline, buy online

Research offline, buy offline

I had always predicted that research offline, buy online would be the model for the future - people like to kick the tires, but hate dealing with salespeople, or to have to carry heavy goods home (online also usually gives a lower price), but it seems by some distance that research online, buy offline is the model that works best, i.e. find the best buy and go to the store.

This is a direct problem for internet TV advertising, where proving that your ads are building a brand is a much more difficult argument than measuring actually off ad sales. For all its power, have you ever heard anyone say 'I bought this 'cause I liked the TV ad..'

New KIT

Credit where credit is due. I don't think KIT Media is out of the woods, but this is a company that has been actively managed out of its dodgy Roo TV past and has become the rollup in the Internet TV industry.

The emphasis is on performance and the former management's confused and sprawling empire seems to have been taken under control and focused into a video marketing company.

Smart move. Video marketing companies will develop just like web deevlopment companies appeared in the 90/00s.

A $40m revenue stream that, it claims, is EBITDA positive would create the first Internet TV company that has made a mark on the public markets.

There's little doubt that KIT is doing better than its CEO's previous employer at Jump TV.

Moral Dilema

A recent Forrester research project got me thinking. Its conjecture was pretty simple - give up TV or give up internet?

Now, I live in a house in Wales where there's internet but no TV (OK, there's the free Sky thing, but this often collapses in bad weather).

Now that you can get most of ITV, BBC, C4 and S4C online I'd go with the latter. TV without email. TV without looking up that vague fact online. TV without being on a chat service at the same time... In the Top Trumps analysis, the internet has it.

But the question is what needs rephrasing for me. Let's try:

1) Any TV service in the UK

or

2) A reliable 2MBps internet service

Well, this would be no comptition. 2) would win any day.

Commercial Break

Another irrelevant moment, but forgive me for wondering why we're threatening to sue Iceland for the money they lost UK investors and we're not threatening to sue Bush's US, who lost our companies and citizens far more money in a far more reckless way.

I suppose Governments act like businesses - you only bully people you know are weaker than you.

Roq Bottom

Sad to say that pay-per-view internet video aggregator Jalipo is no more. The company was recently acquired by mobile video provider Rok Entertainment and has now been put into insolvency. I'm not sure what was behind the original strategy or what elements of the original company that have been retained. My suspicion is that it was Jalipo's relationship with content companies that was attractive to Roq.

Looking Down The Barrel

The recessions seems to be looming ever deeper and it's worth reflecting on what impact this is going to have on the internet and TV industries.

I've previously blogged that recession is traditionally a good time for the entertainment industry, but there is a problem with this thesis - namely that most content is now advertising driven and advertising is going to be badly hit. However, the relative impact will be less than in other industries such as pubs and restaurants, retail, property and, inevitably, financial services.

But, the markets have been vicious with public Internet TV companies this year; these are the year highs and the current market prices of various stocks on the US markets:

On2 1.56 - .25

Akamai 40.38 - 13.93

Limelight 13.49 - 2.19

Onstream 1.55 - 0.30

Narrowstep 0.54 - 0.02

Kit 1.15 - 0.22

There seems little relationship between the business fundamentals of these stocks and their share values. Certainly, confidence is a factor, but the message is clear. The public markets are no place for anyone involved in Internet TV.

For traditional TV the news is even worse. In the UK, OFCOM reckons that £100 - 250m is going to leave the UK production industry in the coming year. In an industry where around £4.5bn is spent on programming this is significant but not terminal. However, as this continues year on year as more and more channels appear, the result on the landscape of the UK TV industry is going to be profound (and other markets around the world will actually be more susceptible due to the dominance of PBS in the UK).

So, is the TV industry going to contract? Probably not. The advertising industry is increasingly looking for new vehicles with which to build brands and this is where the future growth of TV is likely to come from.

Over the past fifty years brands have paid the way of TV, but with little accountability. Now, it's time for the 'Google effect' (i.e. the accountability of advertising spend) to start having an impact on TV.

Broadcasters' obsession with volume, as opposed to quality, of audience will hurt them badly if they do not change their ways. Brave production companies should be building for this eventuality in an age where the ubiquity of television changes the rules - and a recession accelerates the change.

Love Of The Box

After raving on about Sling a couple of years ago, regular readers of this blog will notice that I've gone very quiet about this pioneering company.

There are a couple of reasons: acquisition of the company by US satellite company EchoStar seems to have resulted in an inevitable concentration on the US market. Secondly, my box refused to work with Virgin's + box no matter what I tried.

In reality, Sling is a gadget freak's toy. When it works it's very cool, although does depend on your upstream bandwidth, so quality was always an issue.

Now, news reaches me that Sling are launching a UGC portal as well as featuring on demand content. In other words, they're making a play for the second box market alongside PS3, XBox, loads of ISPs and many others.

If I were Sling I would focus my efforts on an OEM software product that you can sell to the above and to screen manufacturers and PC vendors. But the 1950s view that having a box in customers' houses is a way to make money prevails.

Marginal Error

With the odd exception, little real money has been made by Internet TV platform companies; the original vendors, theplatform, were reportedly profitable when sold to Comcast, and Narrowstep were at break even in the UK before being .

Move Networks managed an exit to Microsoft, but others such as Roo/KIT, FeedRoom, WhiteBlox have all trundled along.

One venerable exception seems to be Entriq, who, ironically, benefited from a misfounded belief in downloads over streaming when major broadcasters' services were originally established.

In a totally unscientific estimation, I would say that the North American and European Internet TV platform market has a potential value of around $500m in 2008. However, more than two thirds of this will have been spent on in house teams, systems integrators and web agencies, leaving around $165m to the pure play market. With around forty to fifty players in the market with a turnover of $500k to $10m, that's the market more than saturated.

So, is this a flawed market ?

When I formed Narrowstep, I saw a mixed revenue model based on licences, CDN costs, revenue share and advertising share. But, it turns out that the long tail in this industry had a very large head and a very long tail. That is, only a handful of clients are likely to turn in the volume of business that's profitable to VC funded or public businesses based on this business model. And the competition for this handful of clients has been vicious.

But, what has been forgotten in this land grab is what the internet has done for video.

It has brought distribution.

Running production companies in the 'old days', a client would spend a fortune on a corporate video, but then wouldn't know what to do with the resulting VHSes and DVDs.

Entertainment has only ever been one part of the market for Internet TV services: education, training, information and help, shopping, corporate communications, the potential list goes on and on.

The failure of the Internet TV service market to date has been the over-emphasis on the few big entertainment players and neglect of other, potentially larger and more lucrative markets.

If You Don't Succeed At First..

Despite its massive popularity, Google have failed to capitalise on YouTube's audience. The trial of its InStream overlay system has reportedly not being very successful and the company is now adding post-roll ads to its clips.

The point-and-click format is probably the reasons that YouTube is so difficult to monetize; pre-rolls and overlays are intrusive, but without a playlist capability, the instream option - by far the most successful format for internet tv advertising - isn't a possibility.

Land Of Debt

Aw, gawd. This is absolutely nothing to do with this blog. But I have to get it off my chest.

Pouring $700 into the US financial system is going to:

1. Line the pockets of the greediest, cleverest members of the US society
2. Tax the poor
3. Be meaningless in a world of derivatives, where the weakness of pouring money into the system will be exploited as the money is syphoned off by greedy bankers faster than aid to a third world dictatorship
   
4. Make sure that Bush’s mates are looked after following his innumerable cock ups in office
   

In a country that has managed to run up trillions of dollars of debt, this is little more than a rounding error.

In nationalising Fanny Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG and supporting other deals the US has gone from being a capitalist society to, essentially, being a neo-communist state. Wow, Bush Jr, what a great result for your presidency.... You started off as Regan and ended up as Mao!

Business Mash Ups

The latest trend in the Internet TV business seems to be corporate mash-ups where companies are subtly, or radically - changing their business direction by merging with other companies in the same field.

OnStream's acquisition of Narrowstep took the former into the VMS business, which it could theoretically leverage against its broad corporate business base. However, the market has caned OnStream since the deal was announced a few months ago and shares are down 70%.

Meanwhile, Anystream has acquired Voxant, with the stated intention of getting into the long tail video syndication business.

Expect more mash-ups in the near future as companies try to adjust their business plans to an ever changing, highly competitive marketplace.

Internet TV Channels List

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Television (tv)

The Television technology can be divided along two lines: those developments that depended upon both mechanical and electronic principles, and those dependent only on electronic principles. From the latter descended all modern televisions, but these would not have been possible without the discoveries and insights garnered from the development of the electromechanical systems.

TV is a San Francisco based Internet television network showing original programming catering to the niche market of technology enthusiasts. They also show programming from Revision through a contract deal with Revision. Programming is delivered to viewers through their online outlet and some programming is available on the iTunes Store in podcast form. CNET TV is operated by CNET Networks, Inc. through their CNET.com brand. In turn, the entire operation is owned by CBS Interactive, Inc.

Broadcasting

It was available mostly in markets in which Raycom Media operates stations. According to a March 2006 article in The New York Times, Tribune Broadcasting announced that it would start multicasting The Tube on its DTV channels in summer 2006. [1] However, it began transmission on digital television in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia. The network also broadcasted on WLVI in Boston, which was purchased from Tribune by Sunbeam Television in late December 2006.
Equity Broadcasting distributed the programming free-to-air on Galaxy 10R Ku-band satellite for carriage by some of the individual LPTV operations which it owned and operated in various US cities.
Sinclair Broadcasting would join in on airing The Tube as well, announcing on March 23, 2006 that they would start multicasting the network on many of their outlets. [2] That relationship stopped temporarily (and eventually permanently) on January 1, 2007, in a dispute involving FCC requirements for digital subchannels.
The FCC ruled that in addition to the main analog channels, each digital subchannel would also be required to run the government mandated the hours of E/I programming per week as well as any Emergency Alert System tests and bulletins. The Tube would air the animal-and-music program Wildlife Jams to meet the E/I requirements.

Watching TV Makes You Smarter

The Sleeper Curve


SCIENTIST A: Has he asked for anything special?
SCIENTIST B: Yes, this morning for breakfast . . . he requested something called ''wheat germ, organic honey and tiger's milk.''
SCIENTIST A: Oh, yes. Those were the charmed substances that some years ago were felt to contain life-preserving properties.
SCIENTIST B: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or . . . hot fudge?
SCIENTIST A: Those were thought to be unhealthy.
— From Woody Allen's ''Sleeper''

On Jan. 24, the Fox network showed an episode of its hit drama ''24,'' the real-time thriller known for its cliffhanger tension and often- gruesome violence. Over the preceding weeks, a number of public controversies had erupted around ''24,'' mostly focused on its portrait of Muslim terrorists and its penchant for torture scenes. The episode that was shown on the 24th only fanned the flames higher: in one scene, a terrorist enlists a hit man to kill his child for not fully supporting the jihadist cause; in another scene, the secretary of defense authorizes the torture of his son to uncover evidence of a terrorist plot.

But the explicit violence and the post-9/11 terrorist anxiety are not the only elements of ''24'' that would have been unthinkable on prime-time network television 20 years ago. Alongside the notable change in content lies an equally notable change in form. During its 44 minutes -- a real-time hour, minus 16 minutes for commercials -- the episode connects the lives of 21 distinct characters, each with a clearly defined ''story arc,'' as the Hollywood jargon has it: a defined personality with motivations and obstacles and specific relationships with other characters. Nine primary narrative threads wind their way through those 44 minutes, each drawing extensively upon events and information revealed in earlier episodes. Draw a map of all those intersecting plots and personalities, and you get structure that -- where formal complexity is concerned -- more closely resembles ''Middlemarch'' than a hit TV drama of years past like ''Bonanza.''

For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a path declining steadily toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the ''masses'' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies try to give the masses what they want. But as that ''24'' episode suggests, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less. To make sense of an episode of ''24,'' you have to integrate far more information than you would have a few decades ago watching a comparable show. Beneath the violence and the ethnic stereotypes, another trend appears: to keep up with entertainment like ''24,'' you have to pay attention, make inferences, track shifting social relationships. This is what I call the Sleeper Curve: the most debased forms of mass diversion -- video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms -- turn out to be nutritional after all.

I believe that the Sleeper Curve is the single most important new force altering the mental development of young people today, and I believe it is largely a force for good: enhancing our cognitive faculties, not dumbing them down. And yet you almost never hear this story in popular accounts of today's media. Instead, you hear dire tales of addiction, violence, mindless escapism. It's assumed that shows that promote smoking or gratuitous violence are bad for us, while those that thunder against teen pregnancy or intolerance have a positive role in society. Judged by that morality-play standard, the story of popular culture over the past 50 years -- if not 500 -- is a story of decline: the morals of the stories have grown darker and more ambiguous, and the antiheroes have multiplied.

The usual counterargument here is that what media have lost in moral clarity, they have gained in realism. The real world doesn't come in nicely packaged public-service announcements, and we're better off with entertainment like ''The Sopranos'' that reflects our fallen state with all its ethical ambiguity. I happen to be sympathetic to that argument, but it's not the one I want to make here. I think there is another way to assess the social virtue of pop culture, one that looks at media as a kind of cognitive workout, not as a series of life lessons. There may indeed be more ''negative messages'' in the mediasphere today. But that's not the only way to evaluate whether our television shows or video games are having a positive impact. Just as important -- if not more important -- is the kind of thinking you have to do to make sense of a cultural experience. That is where the Sleeper Curve becomes visible.

Televised Intelligence

Consider the cognitive demands that televised narratives place on their viewers. With many shows that we associate with ''quality'' entertainment -- ''The Mary Tyler Moore Show,'' ''Murphy Brown,'' ''Frasier'' -- the intelligence arrives fully formed in the words and actions of the characters on-screen. They say witty things to one another and avoid lapsing into tired sitcom cliches, and we smile along in our living rooms, enjoying the company of these smart people. But assuming we're bright enough to understand the sentences they're saying, there's no intellectual labor involved in enjoying the show as a viewer. You no more challenge your mind by watching these intelligent shows than you challenge your body watching ''Monday Night Football.'' The intellectual work is happening on-screen, not off.

But another kind of televised intelligence is on the rise. Think of the cognitive benefits conventionally ascribed to reading: attention, patience, retention, the parsing of narrative threads. Over the last half-century, programming on TV has increased the demands it places on precisely these mental faculties. This growing complexity involves three primary elements: multiple threading, flashing arrows and social networks.

According to television lore, the age of multiple threads began with the arrival in 1981 of ''Hill Street Blues,'' the Steven Bochco police drama invariably praised for its ''gritty realism.'' Watch an episode of ''Hill Street Blues'' side by side with any major drama from the preceding decades -- ''Starsky and Hutch,'' for instance, or ''Dragnet'' -- and the structural transformation will jump out at you. The earlier shows follow one or two lead characters, adhere to a single dominant plot and reach a decisive conclusion at the end of the episode. Draw an outline of the narrative threads in almost every ''Dragnet'' episode, and it will be a single line: from the initial crime scene, through the investigation, to the eventual cracking of the case. A typical ''Starsky and Hutch'' episode offers only the slightest variation on this linear formula: the introduction of a comic subplot that usually appears only at the tail ends of the episode, creating a structure that looks like this graph. The vertical axis represents the number of individual threads, and the horizontal axis is time.

A ''Hill Street Blues'' episode complicates the picture in a number of profound ways. The narrative weaves together a collection of distinct strands -- sometimes as many as 10, though at least half of the threads involve only a few quick scenes scattered through the episode. The number of primary characters -- and not just bit parts -- swells significantly. And the episode has fuzzy borders: picking up one or two threads from previous episodes at the outset and leaving one or two threads open at the end. Charted graphically, an average episode looks like this.

Critics generally cite ''Hill Street Blues'' as the beginning of ''serious drama'' native in the television medium -- differentiating the series from the single-episode dramatic programs from the 50's, which were Broadway plays performed in front of a camera. But the ''Hill Street'' innovations weren't all that original; they'd long played a defining role in popular television, just not during the evening hours. The structure of a ''Hill Street'' episode -- and indeed of all the critically acclaimed dramas that followed, from ''thirtysomething'' to ''Six Feet Under'' -- is the structure of a soap opera. ''Hill Street Blues'' might have sparked a new golden age of television drama during its seven-year run, but it did so by using a few crucial tricks that ''Guiding Light'' and ''General Hospital'' mastered long before.

Bochco's genius with ''Hill Street'' was to marry complex narrative structure with complex subject matter. 'Dallas'' had already shown that the extended, interwoven threads of the soap-opera genre could survive the weeklong interruptions of a prime-time show, but the actual content of ''Dallas'' was fluff. (The most probing issue it addressed was the question, now folkloric, of who shot J.R.) ''All in the Family'' and ''Rhoda'' showed that you could tackle complex social issues, but they did their tackling in the comfort of the sitcom living room. ''Hill Street'' had richly drawn characters confronting difficult social issues and a narrative structure to match.

Since ''Hill Street'' appeared, the multi-threaded drama has become the most widespread fictional genre on prime time: ''St. Elsewhere,'' ''L.A. Law,'' ''thirtysomething,'' ''Twin Peaks,'' ''N.Y.P.D. Blue,'' ''E.R.,'' ''The West Wing,'' ''Alias,'' ''Lost.'' (The only prominent holdouts in drama are shows like ''Law and Order'' that have essentially updated the venerable ''Dragnet'' format and thus remained anchored to a single narrative line.) Since the early 80's, however, there has been a noticeable increase in narrative complexity in these dramas. The most ambitious show on TV to date, ''The Sopranos,'' routinely follows up to a dozen distinct threads over the course of an episode, with more than 20 recurring characters. An episode from late in the first season looks like this.

The total number of active threads equals the multiple plots of ''Hill Street,'' but here each thread is more substantial. The show doesn't offer a clear distinction between dominant and minor plots; each story line carries its weight in the mix. The episode also displays a chordal mode of storytelling entirely absent from ''Hill Street'': a single scene in ''The Sopranos'' will often connect to three different threads at the same time, layering one plot atop another. And every single thread in this ''Sopranos'' episode builds on events from previous episodes and continues on through the rest of the season and beyond.

Put those charts together, and you have a portrait of the Sleeper Curve rising over the past 30 years of popular television. In a sense, this is as much a map of cognitive changes in the popular mind as it is a map of on-screen developments, as if the media titans decided to condition our brains to follow ever-larger numbers of simultaneous threads. Before ''Hill Street,'' the conventional wisdom among television execs was that audiences wouldn't be comfortable following more than three plots in a single episode, and indeed, the ''Hill Street'' pilot, which was shown in January 1981, brought complaints from viewers that the show was too complicated. Fast-forward two decades, and shows like ''The Sopranos'' engage their audiences with narratives that make ''Hill Street'' look like ''Three's Company.'' Audiences happily embrace that complexity because they've been trained by two decades of multi-threaded dramas.

Multi-threading is the most celebrated structural feature of the modern television drama, and it certainly deserves some of the honor that has been doled out to it. And yet multi-threading is only part of the story.

The Case for Confusion

Shortly after the arrival of the first-generation slasher movies -- ''Halloween,'' ''Friday the 13th'' -- Paramount released a mock-slasher flick called ''Student Bodies,'' parodying the genre just as the ''Scream'' series would do 15 years later. In one scene, the obligatory nubile teenage baby sitter hears a noise outside a suburban house; she opens the door to investigate, finds nothing and then goes back inside. As the door shuts behind her, the camera swoops in on the doorknob, and we see that she has left the door unlocked. The camera pulls back and then swoops down again for emphasis. And then a flashing arrow appears on the screen, with text that helpfully explains: ''Unlocked!''

That flashing arrow is parody, of course, but it's merely an exaggerated version of a device popular stories use all the time. When a sci-fi script inserts into some advanced lab a nonscientist who keeps asking the science geeks to explain what they're doing with that particle accelerator, that's a flashing arrow that gives the audience precisely the information it needs in order to make sense of the ensuing plot. (''Whatever you do, don't spill water on it, or you'll set off a massive explosion!'') These hints serve as a kind of narrative hand-holding. Implicitly, they say to the audience, ''We realize you have no idea what a particle accelerator is, but here's the deal: all you need to know is that it's a big fancy thing that explodes when wet.'' They focus the mind on relevant details: ''Don't worry about whether the baby sitter is going to break up with her boyfriend. Worry about that guy lurking in the bushes.'' They reduce the amount of analytic work you need to do to make sense of a story. All you have to do is follow the arrows.

By this standard, popular television has never been harder to follow. If narrative threads have experienced a population explosion over the past 20 years, flashing arrows have grown correspondingly scarce. Watching our pinnacle of early 80's TV drama, ''Hill Street Blues,'' we find there's an informational wholeness to each scene that differs markedly from what you see on shows like ''The West Wing'' or ''The Sopranos'' or ''Alias'' or ''E.R.''

''Hill Street'' has ambiguities about future events: will a convicted killer be executed? Will Furillo marry Joyce Davenport? Will Renko find it in himself to bust a favorite singer for cocaine possession? But the present-tense of each scene explains itself to the viewer with little ambiguity. There's an open question or a mystery driving each of these stories -- how will it all turn out? -- but there's no mystery about the immediate activity on the screen. A contemporary drama like ''The West Wing,'' on the other hand, constantly embeds mysteries into the present-tense events: you see characters performing actions or discussing events about which crucial information has been deliberately withheld. Anyone who has watched more than a handful of ''The West Wing'' episodes closely will know the feeling: scene after scene refers to some clearly crucial but unexplained piece of information, and after the sixth reference, you'll find yourself wishing you could rewind the tape to figure out what they're talking about, assuming you've missed something. And then you realize that you're supposed to be confused. The open question posed by these sequences is not ''How will this turn out in the end?'' The question is ''What's happening right now?''

The deliberate lack of hand-holding extends down to the microlevel of dialogue as well. Popular entertainment that addresses technical issues -- whether they are the intricacies of passing legislation, or of performing a heart bypass, or of operating a particle accelerator -- conventionally switches between two modes of information in dialogue: texture and substance. Texture is all the arcane verbiage provided to convince the viewer that they're watching Actual Doctors at Work; substance is the material planted amid the background texture that the viewer needs make sense of the plot.

Conventionally, narratives demarcate the line between texture and substance by inserting cues that flag or translate the important data. There's an unintentionally comical moment in the 2004 blockbuster ''The Day After Tomorrow'' in which the beleaguered climatologist (played by Dennis Quaid) announces his theory about the imminent arrival of a new ice age to a gathering of government officials. In his speech, he warns that ''we have hit a critical desalinization point!'' At this moment, the writer-director Roland Emmerich -- a master of brazen arrow-flashing -- has an official follow with the obliging remark: ''It would explain what's driving this extreme weather.'' They might as well have had a flashing ''Unlocked!'' arrow on the screen.

The dialogue on shows like ''The West Wing'' and ''E.R.,'' on the other hand, doesn't talk down to its audiences. It rushes by, the words accelerating in sync with the high-speed tracking shots that glide through the corridors and operating rooms. The characters talk faster in these shows, but the truly remarkable thing about the dialogue is not purely a matter of speed; it's the willingness to immerse the audience in information that most viewers won't understand. Here's a typical scene from ''E.R.'':



[WEAVER AND WRIGHT push a gurney containing a 16-year-old girl. Her parents, JANNA AND FRANK MIKAMI, follow close behind. CARTER AND LUCY fall in.]
WEAVER: 16-year-old, unconscious, history of biliary atresia.
CARTER: Hepatic coma?
WEAVER: Looks like it.
MR. MIKAMI: She was doing fine until six months ago.
CARTER: What medication is she on?
MRS. MIKAMI: Ampicillin, tobramycin, vitamins a, d and k.
LUCY: Skin's jaundiced.
WEAVER: Same with the sclera. Breath smells sweet.
CARTER: Fetor hepaticus?
WEAVER: Yep.
LUCY: What's that?
WEAVER: Her liver's shut down. Let's dip a urine. [To CARTER] Guys, it's getting a little crowded in here, why don't you deal with the parents? Start lactulose, 30 cc's per NG.
CARTER: We're giving medicine to clean her blood.
WEAVER: Blood in the urine, two-plus.
CARTER: The liver failure is causing her blood not to clot.
MRS. MIKAMI: Oh, God. . . .
CARTER: Is she on the transplant list?
MR. MIKAMI: She's been Status 2a for six months, but they haven't been able to find her a match.
CARTER: Why? What's her blood type?
MR. MIKAMI: AB.
[This hits CARTER like a lightning bolt. LUCY gets it, too. They share a look.]

There are flashing arrows here, of course -- ''The liver failure is causing her blood not to clot'' -- but the ratio of medical jargon to layperson translation is remarkably high. From a purely narrative point of view, the decisive line arrives at the very end: ''AB.'' The 16-year-old's blood type connects her to an earlier plot line, involving a cerebral-hemorrhage victim who -- after being dramatically revived in one of the opening scenes -- ends up brain-dead. Far earlier, before the liver-failure scene above, Carter briefly discusses harvesting the hemorrhage victim's organs for transplants, and another doctor makes a passing reference to his blood type being the rare AB (thus making him an unlikely donor). The twist here revolves around a statistically unlikely event happening at the E.R. -- an otherwise perfect liver donor showing up just in time to donate his liver to a recipient with the same rare blood type. But the show reveals this twist with remarkable subtlety. To make sense of that last ''AB'' line -- and the look of disbelief on Carter's and Lucy's faces -- you have to recall a passing remark uttered earlier regarding a character who belongs to a completely different thread. Shows like ''E.R.'' may have more blood and guts than popular TV had a generation ago, but when it comes to storytelling, they possess a quality that can only be described as subtlety and discretion.

Even Bad TV Is Better

Skeptics might argue that I have stacked the deck here by focusing on relatively highbrow titles like ''The Sopranos'' or ''The West Wing,'' when in fact the most significant change in the last five years of narrative entertainment involves reality TV. Does the contemporary pop cultural landscape look quite as promising if the representative show is ''Joe Millionaire'' instead of ''The West Wing''?

I think it does, but to answer that question properly, you have to avoid the tendency to sentimentalize the past. When people talk about the golden age of television in the early 70's -- invoking shows like ''The Mary Tyler Moore Show'' and ''All in the Family'' -- they forget to mention how awful most television programming was during much of that decade. If you're going to look at pop-culture trends, you have to compare apples to apples, or in this case, lemons to lemons. The relevant comparison is not between ''Joe Millionaire'' and ''MASH''; it's between ''Joe Millionaire'' and ''The Newlywed Game,'' or between ''Survivor'' and ''The Love Boat.''

What you see when you make these head-to-head comparisons is that a rising tide of complexity has been lifting programming at the bottom of the quality spectrum and at the top. ''The Sopranos'' is several times more demanding of its audiences than ''Hill Street'' was, and ''Joe Millionaire'' has made comparable advances over ''Battle of the Network Stars.'' This is the ultimate test of the Sleeper Curve theory: even the junk has improved.

If early television took its cues from the stage, today's reality programming is reliably structured like a video game: a series of competitive tests, growing more challenging over time. Many reality shows borrow a subtler device from gaming culture as well: the rules aren't fully established at the outset. You learn as you play.

On a show like ''Survivor'' or ''The Apprentice,'' the participants -- and the audience -- know the general objective of the series, but each episode involves new challenges that haven't been ordained in advance. The final round of the first season of ''The Apprentice,'' for instance, threw a monkey wrench into the strategy that governed the play up to that point, when Trump announced that the two remaining apprentices would have to assemble and manage a team of subordinates who had already been fired in earlier episodes of the show. All of a sudden the overarching objective of the game -- do anything to avoid being fired -- presented a potential conflict to the remaining two contenders: the structure of the final round favored the survivor who had maintained the best relationships with his comrades. Suddenly, it wasn't enough just to have clawed your way to the top; you had to have made friends while clawing. The original ''Joe Millionaire'' went so far as to undermine the most fundamental convention of all -- that the show's creators don't openly lie to the contestants about the prizes -- by inducing a construction worker to pose as man of means while 20 women competed for his attention.

Reality programming borrowed another key ingredient from games: the intellectual labor of probing the system's rules for weak spots and opportunities. As each show discloses its conventions, and each participant reveals his or her personality traits and background, the intrigue in watching comes from figuring out how the participants should best navigate the environment that has been created for them. The pleasure in these shows comes not from watching other people being humiliated on national television; it comes from depositing other people in a complex, high-pressure environment where no established strategies exist and watching them find their bearings. That's why the water-cooler conversation about these shows invariably tracks in on the strategy displayed on the previous night's episode: why did Kwame pick Omarosa in that final round? What devious strategy is Richard Hatch concocting now?

When we watch these shows, the part of our brain that monitors the emotional lives of the people around us -- the part that tracks subtle shifts in intonation and gesture and facial expression -- scrutinizes the action on the screen, looking for clues. We trust certain characters implicitly and vote others off the island in a heartbeat. Traditional narrative shows also trigger emotional connections to the characters, but those connections don't have the same participatory effect, because traditional narratives aren't explicitly about strategy. The phrase ''Monday-morning quarterbacking'' describes the engaged feeling that spectators have in relation to games as opposed to stories. We absorb stories, but we second-guess games. Reality programming has brought that second-guessing to prime time, only the game in question revolves around social dexterity rather than the physical kind.

The Rewards of Smart Culture

The quickest way to appreciate the Sleeper Curve's cognitive training is to sit down and watch a few hours of hit programming from the late 70's on Nick at Nite or the SOAPnet channel or on DVD. The modern viewer who watches a show like ''Dallas'' today will be bored by the content -- not just because the show is less salacious than today's soap operas (which it is by a small margin) but also because the show contains far less information in each scene, despite the fact that its soap-opera structure made it one of the most complicated narratives on television in its prime. With ''Dallas,'' the modern viewer doesn't have to think to make sense of what's going on, and not having to think is boring. Many recent hit shows -- ''24,'' ''Survivor,'' ''The Sopranos,'' ''Alias,'' ''Lost,'' ''The Simpsons,'' ''E.R.'' -- take the opposite approach, layering each scene with a thick network of affiliations. You have to focus to follow the plot, and in focusing you're exercising the parts of your brain that map social networks, that fill in missing information, that connect multiple narrative threads.

Of course, the entertainment industry isn't increasing the cognitive complexity of its products for charitable reasons. The Sleeper Curve exists because there's money to be made by making culture smarter. The economics of television syndication and DVD sales mean that there's a tremendous financial pressure to make programs that can be watched multiple times, revealing new nuances and shadings on the third viewing. Meanwhile, the Web has created a forum for annotation and commentary that allows more complicated shows to prosper, thanks to the fan sites where each episode of shows like ''Lost'' or ''Alias'' is dissected with an intensity usually reserved for Talmud scholars. Finally, interactive games have trained a new generation of media consumers to probe complex environments and to think on their feet, and that gamer audience has now come to expect the same challenges from their television shows. In the end, the Sleeper Curve tells us something about the human mind. It may be drawn toward the sensational where content is concerned -- sex does sell, after all. But the mind also likes to be challenged; there's real pleasure to be found in solving puzzles, detecting patterns or unpacking a complex narrative system.

In pointing out some of the ways that popular culture has improved our minds, I am not arguing that parents should stop paying attention to the way their children amuse themselves. What I am arguing for is a change in the criteria we use to determine what really is cognitive junk food and what is genuinely nourishing. Instead of a show's violent or tawdry content, instead of wardrobe malfunctions or the F-word, the true test should be whether a given show engages or sedates the mind. Is it a single thread strung together with predictable punch lines every 30 seconds? Or does it map a complex social network? Is your on-screen character running around shooting everything in sight, or is she trying to solve problems and manage resources? If your kids want to watch reality TV, encourage them to watch ''Survivor'' over ''Fear Factor.'' If they want to watch a mystery show, encourage ''24'' over ''Law and Order.'' If they want to play a violent game, encourage Grand Theft Auto over Quake. Indeed, it might be just as helpful to have a rating system that used mental labor and not obscenity and violence as its classification scheme for the world of mass culture.

Kids and grown-ups each can learn from their increasingly shared obsessions. Too often we imagine the blurring of kid and grown-up cultures as a series of violations: the 9-year-olds who have to have nipple broaches explained to them thanks to Janet Jackson; the middle-aged guy who can't wait to get home to his Xbox. But this demographic blur has a commendable side that we don't acknowledge enough. The kids are forced to think like grown-ups: analyzing complex social networks, managing resources, tracking subtle narrative intertwinings, recognizing long-term patterns. The grown-ups, in turn, get to learn from the kids: decoding each new technological wave, parsing the interfaces and discovering the intellectual rewards of play. Parents should see this as an opportunity, not a crisis. Smart culture is no longer something you force your kids to ingest, like green vegetables. It's something you share.

The Good Things About Television

Television is an inescapable part of modern culture. We depend on TV for entertainment, news, education, culture, weather, sports—and even music, since the advent of music videos.

TIP: Create your own family TV-viewing traditions, such as watching Olympic coverage, the NHL playoffs, classic movies or a weekly comedy show.

With the recent explosion in satellite and digital speciality channels, we now have access to a plethora of both good quality and inappropriate TV content. In this crowded television environment, the key for parents is to search out high quality TV programs for their kids, and whenever possible, enjoy them together as a family.

Television offers lots of benefits to kids, including:

• Because of its ability to create powerful touchstones, TV enables young people to share cultural experiences with others.
  
  
• Shared viewing gives family members of all ages an opportunity to spend time together.
  
  
• Parents can use TV as a catalyst to get kids reading—following up on TV programs by getting books on the same subjects or reading authors whose work was adapted for the programs.
  
  
• Great television can teach kids important values and life lessons.
  
  
• TV programs often explores controversial or sensitive issues, which can make it easier for parents and kids to discuss them.
  
  
• Educational programming can develop young children's socialization and learning skills.
  
  
• News, current events and historical programming can help make young people more aware of other cultures and people.
  
  
• Documentaries can help develop critical thinking about society and the world.
  
  

• TIP: Whenever possible, choose Canadian programs for your family viewing time.

  TV can help introduce your family to classic Hollywood films and foreign movies that may not be available in your local video store.
  
  
• Cultural programming can open up the world of music and art for young people.

How to choose good TV

How can you select viewing that is good for your children? David Kleeman, Director of the American Center for Children and Media, says ask yourself the following questions:

• Does the program actively engage my child, physically or intellectually?
  Television watching doesn't have to be passive. It can prompt questions, kindle curiosity, or teach activities to pursue when the set is off.
  
  
• Do I respect this program?
  Parents don't have to like every show their children choose—in fact young people need their own district culture. But parents should trust that a program's creators understand and respect how children grow and learn.
  
  
• Does my child see others like himself or herself on television?
  Young children believe that television reflects the real world. To not see people like themselves—in race, ethnicity, or physical ability, for example—may diminish their self worth. A lack of role models should spark discussion about how TV portrays different types of people.
  
  
• How do makers of this program regard my child?
  Some program creators see young people as consumers to be sold to. Others see them as students to be educated, as future citizens to be engaged in the community, or simply as children, whose work is play.

Internet Television

Internet television (Internet TV or iTV) is television distributed through the Internet. Internet television allows viewers to choose the show they want to watch from a library of shows. The primary models for Internet television are streaming Internet TV or selectable video on an Internet location, typically a website. The video can also be broadcast with a peer-to-peer network(P2PTV),which doesn't rely on single website's streaming.

It differs from IPTV in that IPTV offerings are typically offered on discrete service provider networks,requiring a special IPTV set-top-box.

Internet TV is a quick-to-market and relatively low investment service. Internet TV rides on existing infrastructure including broadband, ADSL, Wi-Fi, cable and satellite which makes it a valuable tool for a wide variety of service providers and content owners looking for new revenue streams.

Implementation

Many programmers are streaming their content live on the internet today to increase viewership (which in turn increases ad revenue) and protect market share. This model is efficient due to the relatively inexpensive multicasting protocol. Viewers may simply request access to the live feed and join into the live stream. This free model has been used in over-the-air broadcasting for years and still works because of the low cost of reaching viewers via multicast. Any viewer with a broadband connection and the correct free media player can watch live television from around the world.

Many internet television "portals" are available which include links to live feeds as well as built-in viewers. Although the live television streams are free, most portals are supported by advertising revenue as well.

Those that create valued and interesting video products now have the opportunity to distribute them directly to a large audience - something impossible with the previous television distributing models (closed software, closed hardware, closed network). The free model has been used around the globe by local and independent television channels aiming for niche target audiences, or to build a collaborative environment for media production, a platform for citizens' media. It isn't strictly a citizen's format either as the broadcast model used in television for decades will begin to find competition in Internet television supported by advertising.

Business Considerations for Internet TV

The recent rapid growth of fast broadband access, accelerated computer power and larger storage capacity has turned Internet TV into a real opportunity for service providers who want to open new revenue streams and increase ARPU.

A major advantage of Internet TV is that it allows content delivery to a huge population with virtually no geographical limitations. But while Internet TV is a much easier and cheaper way of publishing content, operators who are pondering whether to launch an Internet TV service nevertheless have to carefully assess the factors affecting their business cases.

High-quality Internet TV services require subscribers to have continuous access to high bandwidth, so pricing, bandwidth, and network neutrality (at least in the US) are all interdependent factors affecting the business case for Internet TV. For example, while subscribers are generally required to pay more for higher internet bandwidth, it doesn't automatically guarantee good enough bandwidth quality for receiving Internet TV services. So to receive Internet TV, a subscriber will be required to subscribe to an even higher premium service which may present a barrier to scaling up subscribers quickly.

Terminology

There are many ways to deliver video over an IP network and many buzzwords have been applied to these various ways and are sometimes used interchangeably.

IPTV is commonly referred to those services operated and controlled by the same company that operates and controls the "Last Mile" to the consumers' premises. An IPTV service is usually delivered over a complex and investment heavy walled garden network, which is carefully engineered to ensure bandwidth efficient delivery of vast amounts of multicast video traffic. The higher network quality also enables easy delivery of high quality SD or HD TV content to subscribers’ homes.

Internet TV, by definition, is created, managed and distributed via the open Internet. It rides on existing infrastructure and normally refers to those services sourced over the Internet by service providers that cannot control the final delivery. Again, transport streams in IP packets are used with one or more services per transport stream.

Other TV-like services are available on the Internet but these send the video and the audio in separate streams over the IP network and do not use transport streams.

Whilst the differences may seem irrelevant to the consumer, the underlying technology employed is quite different and directly affect the range and quality of service that can be achieved. IPTV users are limited to a relatively small range of programs but at high quality, whereas an Internet TV user may have access to many thousands of channels from literally all over the world but without any guarantee of being able to watch them. Streaming services such as YouTube generally offer User Generated Content UGC as individual short clips rather than professionally produced programs or films grouped as a channel.