For many of us post baby-boomers, this event in the 1970s was when we were just starting to watch TV news and trying to realize what was going on.  The Last Flight from Da Nang set the standard for television reports and was an inspiration for hundreds of aspiring journalists.

If you haven’t seen it, you should. Let me see if I can embed it here (CBS News has a weird system).

Watch CBS News Videos Online

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No, you don’t get to see the actual fall–thank god. And I hope they don’t actually show it because it isn’t something I’d want to see.

But the reactions of the players and fans to this tragedy that happened in Texas is pretty frightening.

FWIW, he got the ball. Another fan caught it and gave it to an usher. The usher passed it along to the team and they signed it before presenting it and other goodies in the hospital to the recovering fan.

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Safari has added a new feature in the Version 5.0 release called “Extensions”. If you have Safari running version 5 (relatively smoothly, as there have been more than a few problems) you might want to take a look at some of the new extensions you can add:

http://mac.appstorm.net/

By far one of the most exciting is the Youtube downloader extension that lets you save a local copy of the content you are watching on Youtube. Quite a bit of fun. It’s on that list at the bottom of the page.

note: many people have reported problems with Safari 5 so you may want to wait until version 5.1 is available and sorts out some of the issues.

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Things are a bit more advanced than the first televised Olympics in 1936

“NBC sucks” is a constant drone you hear each and every Olympics.  ”They didn’t show enough of the Tajikistan entrance, ergo they are biased against Tajikstan” and other silliness often is heard on the messageboards and other sites (and no, I’m not kidding about the Tajik reference–it happens).

So now that we’re done with that, let’s talk about some real live numbers behind this year’s Olympics.

NBC is going to have 835 hours of coverage across multiple platforms (and I believe that includes online coverage as well).  This is way up from the 419 hours of Torino coverage in 2006, and 375.5 hours in 2002 Salt Lake City.  It will also be the first Olympics produced entirely in HD (though my local WRC coverage got messed up last night due to a glitch with Comcast that I had, so I watched most of the Opening Ceremony in Standard Definition.  How 2003 was that?)

NBC is doing all this coverage with a significantly lower staff this year.  2168 employees which is down from the 2,768 they sent to Torino and 3,260 in Salt Lake.  You would figure more advanced technology might require more personnel, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

But if you really want to get into the technical bits of the coverage, you need to read this amazing piece in BroadcastingCable magazine that goes into some massive details, such as What type of Cameras are they using for Vancouver?

NBCU will use more than 100 cameras, all equipped with Canon lenses, to supplement OBS’ coverage. They include Sony HDC-1400, -1500 and -3300 units, and for ENG applications, Sony’s new PDW-F800 XDCAM HD optical-disc camcorders.

Um, ok.  It also goes into some details about how the streams are being processed directly in Vancouver instead of backhauled to their HQ and redone there (as they had to do with the China Olympics).

Anyway, it’s a pretty interesting article if you like technical details of television sports broadcasting.

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Yea, it was low light and all I had was an iPhone, but I did manage to snap a quick picture of Brent Spiner from the It Won’t Stay in Vegas Party in Las Vegas last week.  I also met Levar Burton and quite a few tech celebrities like Robert Scoble, Leo Laporte and Dr. Kiki.  Was an amazing party.

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Are you really going to wear these?

So everyone who went to Vegas came back talking about 3D televisions, and I guess I probably should as well.

The folks who saw 3D tv and who were awestruck basically fell into two categories:  gamers and sports fans.  The gamers were really excited about some of their favorite titles ending up in HD, and the sports fanatics were basically just a bunch of drooling jibbering idiots (according to Leo Laporte of Tech TV during one of his posts).  Oh yea, and porn too.  But we’re not going to go there.

But it might also be about keeping one step ahead of the streaming IPTV services.

Print never had a chance, music took solace (wrongfully) in the idea that mp3′s were of such an inferior quality that people wouldn’t give up CD’s for the sound, and radio went down a long dark road to HD nowhere thinking that was the solution to the problem (as they saw it).  TV moved up to HD quality a few years back, forcing everyone to buy a new television and forestalling, temporarily, the IPTV movement.  Just when bandwidth got to such a level to support some good quality streaming (such as Twit.tv) they raised the bar to a quality level that as some have said, once you have seen it is hard to go back to standard digital.

But now HD streaming is becoming more and more popular.  Hulu is offering HD streams of TV programs, Youtube is as well.  There are TV programs such as FILMON that allows HD streaming of content that is pretty impressive for live quality.

Perhaps this whole 3D thing is just another attempt to push the bar a bit higher–to differentiate IPTV from 3DHD.  Make it harder for the computer folks to keep up with what the television networks are offering, and you are able to stay in business a few more years as an over the air / cable broadcaster.  Stay alive until the new new thing is out, or until TV figures out streaming in such a way as they can make a decent profit from it and avoid the piracy concerns they have.

Or maybe it is just a gimmick.

As for me, no way I’m buying a 3D TV for at least a few product cycles (i.e. until they get a standard, and work out the kinks).

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Didn’t even notice this until re-watching a Youtube clip.

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Random tip of the day.

One of the odd things I’ve noticed with the BBC’s iPlayer downloader is that when you play back videos in full screen, the font size of the subtitles can be ridiculously small.  I looked through the settings trying to find a solution, but there didn’t appear to be on easy way to do it.  I then stumbled across an easy solution.

Switch from fullscreen to the smaller window’d viewer.  Then grab the bottom right little corner and shrink the box even further, to the smallest size as possible.  Suddenly the subtitles will be quite large.  Then hit the fullscreen button.  Viola, you’ll have large subtitles on your playback.

Go figure.

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When it comes to IPTV, the US has Hulu, and the rest of the world has the really cool stuff.

France 24, the France’s government-funded answer to CNN (and in English too)  has been doing some cutting edge stuff like being one of the first ‘live streaming’ applications for the iPhone.  Now they have a desktop widget that will put France 24 on your desktop with relative ease.  Just click to get the widget and turn your PC into a tv (albeit with only one channel)

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