Was there a golden age of TV news?

Wednesday evening and I went to the former LWT building on London's South Bank to learn about how Sky News covered the Afghan elections - those explaining' in a somewhat Dead Donkey Stylee were Tim Marshall apparently the Sky News Foreign Affairs Editor and someone called Bevan Gibson who labours under the fantastic title of Head of Future Technology- Sky News.

Seems that their coverage relies on the Inmarsat BGANS and store and forward type arrangements.

Inmarsat BGAN is a neat little uplink about the size of a laptop PC that permits Satellite access from practically anywhere on the globe which just about copes with a 'moving head' live TV feed and can be used to trickle full bandwidth video over a link.

Personally I think 24 hour news has provided little benefit to the viewer and thought the questioning of the value of 'live' spots from Downing street and the like showed how little respect is given to the audience.

Sky News will be HD by the time of the next UK election - think this will favour Cameron and Clegg over the dour Scotsman.

This is significant - almost Google for TV

Now I've been away from some time but this particular story caught my eye.
Lots of hot air has been generated by UGC and more lately 3D - this sort of targetting could be the saviour of commercial TV (or not).
Interesting that Sky are the ones running with it.

Adverts that are relevant have been touted for some time and it seems that the UK will be geting them from 2011
Here's the story

English Pop Troubadour - 30 years on

Identified by many pop commentators as writer of one of the best singles of all time (Waterloo Sunset) it was a privilege to see Ray Davies perform against the beautiful backdrop of Kenwood.

It's something over 30 years since I'd seen the Kinks perform and the years melted away as Ray re-visited many of his great hits on a soggy Saturday evening (as opposed to a Lazy Sunny Afternoon) particularly poignant is the song Celluloid heroes.

My other connection with Ray is that I nearly went to the Hornsey Art College (now part of the Middlesex University) to Study Video Documentary. So many of the 60's & 70's pop heroes studied art - perhaps this is part of the tension they experience in being pop stars forced to perform old works as opposed to creating new ones?

A Digital Britian on 50p a month?

So the Digital Britain report is out and as to be expected it's trying to be all things to all men - and fails to be anything to anyone. Lord Carter will now move to a lucrative new job.
It brings public intervention to places where there should not be public intervention and yet messes with the PSB model we have .
It is a bad example of dealing with market failure.
How can anyone think that a 50p a month tax is bold or innovative or really going to change anything.
(I'm not the only person to think that the report is rubbish either).

The good news is that little in it will be actioned as the present government is only going to be in power for a few months and it does mean that we're at least thinking about the issues.

On Wednesday I saw an interesting two headed presentation on the subject - the first was a quick revision on what Digital was; the meat of the RTS London event though was a presentation by Stephen Brigden of Cisco: (here's his blog)
To note some of the big questions and stand out lines:

*BBC's iPlayer has disproved the idea that only short form video will survive in the internet.
* It's unlikely that BTs Vision walled garden offering will destroy ' over the top video' (which iplayer is an example of as are is Youtube and 4OD).
*The killer app that the ISPs were looking for is Video the problem is that it's killing the networks and the idea of a flat fee access is looking unsustainable. iPlayer is the cause of over 7% of the UK network traffic. can this live within the concept of 'net neutrality'?
*Stated service levels have little connection with reality as contention rates are seen to be bogus.
*Video over the web is not just a leisure activity - high volumes of traffic from big news stories, sport and the live budget coverage has proved this.

So as you can imagine Cisco see the solution being a better network with more of their devices and of course the NGA networks.