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A Curious Pair: Skype & Traditional Broadcasters

As Skype has become more and more popular various other parties have tried to ride on their coat-tails, including old media companies like TV stations & broadcast networks. I know of at least one TV station that was clandestinely using Skype over broadband to “phone in” breaking news events. The station in question even went so far as to promote the fact that they were using Skype. They did so without prior permission from Skype, and were eventually asked to stop doing so by Skype’s lawyers.

TV stations have been doing “Live Remotes” for decades. Most often this involved using a vehicle equipped with microwave relay gear to send the video feed back to the station in real-time. Much effort goes into ensuring that the video signal looks good when it finally hits air. Larger TV stations or more important projects might merit the use of satellite transponder time to get the video feed back to the station via a satellite link, at considerable expense.

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TechWiseTV Episode #37: Redefining the Remote Office

After my last post about Cisco’s TechWise TV I was a little surprised to be contacted by someone from Cisco offering me a pre-release look at the new episode that is due out later today. It’s episode #37 and all about “Redefining the Remote Office.” As a long time home-office dweller this sounded potentially interesting so I had a look.

The show covers a lot of ground including voice, data, VPNs, security, energy efficiency, SLAs, etc. There were some cool ideas in there. I especially like the idea of scheduled power-off/on of devices based on time of day, controlled by logic in the switch providing POE. That’s pretty cool for SOHO sites, and something I should do around my office.

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Now That The HD Disk War Is Over….

It certainly appears that HD-DVD lost. But it also appears that Blu-Ray did not win. Yes, this was a classic lose-lose situation. For all it’s back room dealing Sony may blow this in the end.

Blu-Ray sales peaked for a few weeks in January but have since slumped. Consumers just may not see value in the price of the players or the media. Ars Technica has the details.

Wait, the price of Blu-Ray players has actually been on the rise since Toshiba conceded the battle! Even I, who still has a first generation Toshiba HD-XA1 HD-DVD player, won’t be buying a Blu-Ray player any time soon. They’re just too expensive.

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BluRay vs Apple TV vs HD Cable vs SD DVD

iLounge has a very interesting post comparing these various home entertainment delivery mechanisms. It considers resolution, bit rates, availability and pricing. I'm not certain that I agree with some of their assumptions. They seem to think that Apple TV with…

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