The idea is simple, but the politics aren’t. All white spaces networks do is stick data into the unused frequencies that neighbour television signals, but broadcasters are afraid that TV signals aren’t robust enough to handle data being packed in so tightly. This trial will be the first real-world test of that belief.

Hopefully all will go well and the tech will be able to provide rural communities with the broadband they’ve been hurting for. [Ars Technica]

Image via FutureAtlas

It turns out that outside the ABC, none of the free to air TV networks actually own an outside broadcast (OB) van. So third parties are subcontracted to film live events. But where do these third parties get their vans from? The answer is both logical and surprising: Sony. The electronics giant has a special branch based at North Ryde where they build and customise trucks for a whole range of companies. At the SMPTE09 show, they were showing off two out of three trucks they’d custom built and designed for TRP.

The main van consisted of four separate sections. Up the front, facing a wall of 12 HD LCDs, is the visual section of the truck. It’s here that all the video feeds from the different cameras are controlled and mixed together. Among the various other technologies in this section are a pair of Bose speakers and an HP Touchsmart PC.

Behind the visual area is the audio section, where a Yamaha deck controls all the audio feeds, and outputs in stereo sound. Nick Buchner, who’s the Senior Product Marketing Manager for Content Creation at Sony was keen to stress that even though Sony actually built the truck, they customised it to the purchasers specifications, which often means using other companies’ products, like the Yamaha deck. It’s for that reason, the van only output in stereo sound rather than 5.1, because it was all that TRP required.

The next section in the van was specifically designed for slow motion replays, which is especially important for horseracing coverage. From this section of the van, controllers can send slow motion replays, directly to the course, to the broadcast and to the horse racing stewards for adjudication of a race. What’s more, they can do it moments after the race has finished thanks to the powerful dedicated servers in the truck. They’ve also got the ability in this section to burn content to DVD immediately.

Finally up the back of the OB van is the engineering section. This is both where all the power behind the van is really held, as well as where all the equalisation of the video happens. It’s an interesting fact that none of the cameras used to film the sport actually does any white balancing or controlling of exposure – it’s all controlled back in the van so all the cameras being used can maintain the same quality.

The smaller van on display at the show – which is for smaller regional races – was just like a reduced version of the main van.

Some of the kit powering the van is pretty amazing – the slow-mo servers alone are worth about $400,000 each. But they’re needed – they render HD video in slow motion at bitrates around 400Gbps, and considering how important slow-mo is to racing, they’re worth every penny. In fact, the whole truck is pretty pricey – TRP’s big truck cost somewhere in the order of $3-4 million to build and customise, including all the special hardware inside. It takes about 6 months for the crew at Sony to actually build the truck, but the overall process of determining exactly what each client needs and the build takes about a year.

And as a guide as to what kind of stuff the vans comprise of, here you go:

28 x HD cameras
76:1 Stabilised lenses
42:1 stabilised lenses
2 x Phantom V10 Extreme Super Slo Cameras
2 x HD PW700 XDCAM Camcorders
8 x EVS XT2
12 x HD XD-CAM Disc Recorders
3 x Gigawave HD Link Systems
8 x Digital Link Systems
HD 3D Graphics, Virtual Graphics and Virtual reality

It just goes to show that even though we reckon our consumer-level kit can be pretty awesome, it’s still miles behind what the people in broadcast get to play with. Lucky bastards!

Television broadcast ads during The Simpsons cost $US20-$40 per thousand viewers. On the web, the rate jumps to $US60.

Shows like The Simpsons and CSI are now commanding higher ad rates on Hulu and TV.com than on television. It’s a byproduct viewers being twice as likely to recall web ads than TV ads, according to Neilsen. (Which I would argue is a byproduct of Hulu showing us a lot fewer ads.)

But before we all declare TV dead, remember that Hulu has only 37 seconds of ads per “30-minute” show while a Fox broadcast includes a whopping 9 minutes of sales pitches. So there’s still technically more money in TV, which will change as soon as Hulu begins cramming 9 minutes of ads into each program.

Lots more on the story here: [Bloomberg via PCWorld]

Jeff recorded one of his favourite episodes of Star Trek at 1PM and got the message above, giving him a whole 2 1/2 hours to watch it. Last time, the flag was a gltich–it’s probably the case here, too, since the TiVo Copy Protection site doesn’t even exist. Still, it’s a nice reminder your magic box really only has as much as power as the broadcasters generously decide grant it. [PVR Blog]

Developers in the Flixwagon lab created the first-ever mobile client that can broadcast live high-quality video from unlocked iPhones to the web. The company wanted to experiment with ways to broadcast live video from the iPhone until the official SDK supports video. Flixwagon plans to continue working with the iPhone SDK in the future so that it can offer this functionality to all users once video becomes a standard iPhone feature.

After Flixwagon is installed on the phone, users can broadcast videos from it to the Flixwagon website with one click. Videos can be watched live or stored for future viewing. Also, they can be embedded in blogs via our flixee widget or uploaded to the user’s YouTube account. Users can also easily determine which of their contacts to share each video with.

If you have an unlocked iPhone with Installer in it, you can click here to join the alpha testing. [Flixwagon and Flixwagon iPhone Clips]

Hug your DVRs, people, because while NBC might be the most anal network about how people watch its shows (very like because it’s last place in ratings), they may very well be just the first to use broadcast flags this way (CBS would probably the be the last, they’re oddly the most forward-thinking network on the digital front). While the broadcast flag was conceptualised to protect premium and PPV content, it could increasingly be used to protect marquis shows like Heroes, to force you to view them on NBC’s terms, like at NBC.com. Why? Ad dollars.

But while it’s expected for networks to act like this, it’s sad that Microsoft is effectively choosing content producers over consumers, when it doesn’t have to, and as the EFF points out, “the only way customers know what Microsoft has agreed to is when the technology they’ve bought suddenly stops working.” And that’s just wrong. [Cnet via Slashdot]

Microsoft’s had this ability in Media Centre to prevent specific shows from being recorded for a while, and the last time there was an error was a few years back during an episode of the Simpsons. It’s not something broadcasters usually do. This also isn’t a unique thing to Microsoft—TiVo has something similar but not quite as severe—it does illustrate the fact that if the providers wanted to, they could shut down your Media Centre DVR right now and you couldn’t do much about it. [JustinJas via Ars Technica]