Tag Archives: 8K TV

Weekly output: ATSC 3.0, password managers, AT&T TV, ShowStoppers TV, CDA 230, CES recap, 8K TV, TV tech at CES (x2)

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Although my Google Maps timeline shows no evidence of CES having happened over the past few days, my calendar and published work (in addition to the posts below, I wrote an extra recap Saturday for Patreon subscribers) leave no doubt that I spent this week “at” this year’s digital-only edition of this trade show.

1/12/2021: ATSC 3.0 backers tout brighter prospects for NEXTGEN TV, FierceVideo

I revisited a subject I covered at CES 2020 for my fave trade-pub client: an upgrade to broadcast TV that might reach more viewers’ homes, especially if TV manufacturers would stop ignoring it.

1/12/2021: Password Managers, U.S. News & World Report

My second project for U.S. News followed the outline of the guides to local Internet providers I helped write a few months ago; after editors analyzed third-party reviews to rank the companies involved, I provided my own context in a profile of each. I thought I knew this category before, but after researching Bitwarden, Keeper, LastPass, Dashlane, 1Password, LogMeOnce, NordPass, KeePassXC, RoboForm, Sticky Password, McAfee True Key, and Zoho Vault (plus head-to-head comparisons of 1Password vs LastPass, Dashlane vs LastPass, and Dashlane vs 1Password), I think I have a much deeper grounding. In the bargain, this work reminded me that I’d been neglecting some useful features in my own password manager, 1Password.

1/12/2021: AT&T TV NotNow: Telco Giant Reshuffles Streaming Services, Forbes

AT&T closing its AT&T TV Now streaming-TV service to new subscribers and making AT&T TV its core video service looked like a welcome stab at simplicity, but then I checked out the fine print in AT&T TV’s two-year-contract option.

1/13/2021: ShowStoppers TV, ShowStoppers

As I did last summer, I emceed the product presentations of three tech companies at an event hosted by the PR firm that, in the Before Times, helped organize my trips to IFA and a few other tech events. Unlike last summer, one of these firms wound up not presenting because they could not get their audio working.

1/13/2021: Special Broadband Breakfast Live Online Town Hall on Section 230, Broadband Breakfast

Twitter’s overdue decision to boot Donald Trump off the service led to this online panel about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the law that lets online forums remove content that’s legal but “otherwise objectionable.” My fellow panelists: Ranking Digital Rights’ Jessica Dheere, the Cato Institute’s Will Duffield, the Computer & Communications Industry Association’s Ali Sternburg, and tech lawyer Cathy Gellis, with Broadband Breakfast editor and publisher Drew Clark moderating our conversation. The next day, Broadband Breakfast’s Samuel Triginelli wrote up the conversation that you can also watch in the embed below.

1/14/2021: Afternoon Learners SIG, Washington Apple Pi

I joined this meeting of one of WAP’s special interest groups via Zoom to share my thoughts on CES. We lost a good 10 minutes to audio glitches that I couldn’t hear but my audience could, so I stuck around for an extra 10 minutes.

1/14/2021: If You Want To Watch 8K Video On Your 8K TV, You May Have To Record It Yourself, Forbes

Yes, I remain deeply skeptical of 8K TV, even if Samsung’s newest line of smartphones can record in the format.

1/15/2021: Yes, you can have — and deserve — a bigger TV. That’s the theme on display at CES trade show, USA Today

No CES is complete for me without a state-of-the-TV piece. My industry-analyst friend Carolina Milanesi provided an opening quote that was more colorful than usual for this type of story.

1/15/2021: TVs at CES, WLW

This Cincinnati radio station had me on their afternoon drive-time show to talk about TVs. I flubbed a question from the hosts about the price for a 70-inch 4K TV: Because I hadn’t thought to leave a browser tab open to any retailer’s TV listings, I had to try to remember the prices I’d seen at Costco three weeks prior and then overshot the going rate by about 50 percent.

Updated 1/18/2021 to add links to my Patreon post, three other posts in the U.S. News password-manager guide, and Broadband Breakfast’s video and recap. 

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Weekly output: IFA, Pay TV 3.0, everything as a service, where to buy an iPhone 11, iOS needs a kids’ mode

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If you’re going to have a bunch of long-in-the-works stories finally post, you could pick a worse time than the week you’re at a journalism conference. This coming week has me at a different event: the Competitive Carriers Association’s conference in Providence, where I’m moderating a panel discussion on 5G wireless in rural areas. (Yes, readers, the title of that panel is 100 percent my fault.)

9/9/2019: 3 ways tech has gone astray at Berlin electronics show, USA Today

USAT took a day or two to post this, for which I was grateful–that lag gave me time to remember to throw in a quote that I’d forgotten to include when I first filed this last Sunday morning before flying home from Berlin.

9/10/2019: What ‘Pay TV 3.0’ will mean for viewers and channels, FierceVideo

This story started with the panel I moderated at a conference this this trade pub hosted outside of Denver in May, hence the above long-in-the-works comment.

9/10/2019: “Everything as a service” is coming—but we’re not there quite yet, Ars Technica

Some of you saw this feature on cloud services briefly appear last week before it vanished without explanation. As Lee Hutchinson, senior tech editor at Ars, later explained in a comment, the story got posted early by mistake. Yes, that is apparently a thing that is possible.

Since the first instance of this story didn’t feature any ads from its sponsor HPE–Ars correctly did not tell me the sponsor’s identity until after I’d filed copy that didn’t mention that firm anyway–it looks like the problem was some mixup on the advertising end.

Anyway, about this lengthy post: Researching the finer points of cloud storage and management services had me leaning well over my skis, but the experience left me with some helpful new sources to consult the next time I’m writing about cloud security and privacy.

9/12/2019: Ordering iPhone 11? The one thing wireless carriers might not want you to know, USA Today

You sort of have read this story before, and you will probably keep reading this as long as most of the major carriers continue to lock phones sold on installment-payment plans.

9/12/2019: The one feature Apple should have added to iOS 13 and iPadOS, Yahoo Finance

My daughter gets credit as the assignment editor on this: Handing over an iPad for her limited allotment of screen time kept reminding me of how unhelpful iOS is in this scenario. I could have written this any time in the last few years, but the impending release of Apple’s iOS 13 and iPadOS–neither with a real kids’ mode–provided a news peg for this story.

Weekly output: Amazon Fire TV, Roku TV, social-media propaganda, IFA

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I’m back from Berlin and my eighth IFA is in the books. I feel more wiped out than usual from jet lag, maybe because my five-hours-late departure Monday left no time for me to walk around the city Wednesday afternoon and get some sunshine into my head. I had better be recovered in three days, when I’ll be back on a plane for the Online News Association’s conference–this year in New Orleans, one of my favorite travel destinations.

If you need more gadget pictures in your life, there’s a slideshow of photos from this year’s IFA waiting after the jump.

9/5/2019: Amazon bids to spark new markets for Fire TV, FierceVideo

I wrote this from an Amazon event in Berlin Wednesday night, at which I had the advantage of being able to quiz a couple of analyst friends who had watched the same sales pitch.

9/7/2019: Roku expands Roku TV program to Europe, FierceVideo

Roku CEO Anthony Wood gave an uncommonly concise keynote at IFA Saturday morning–it ran only 24 minutes.

9/7/2019: Social-media marketing for Sudan’s military, Al Jazeera

I offered my perspective on a weird case of social-media propaganda via Skype from my hotel room.

9/8/2019: 2019 IFA Trade Show Recap with Rob Pegoraro, Moor Insights & Strategy Podcast

I shared my thoughts on this year’s IFA with Moor’s Mark Vena from a semi-quiet table at a restaurant in our hotel; I hope the background chatter from other guests isn’t too distracting.

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Weekly output: 8K TV, tech talk with Mark Vena, Washington Apple Pi

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My workday schedule is about to get disrupted for the next 10 weeks or so: Day-camp season kicks off for our daughter Monday, so I will have a car commute most mornings and many evenings too.

6/17/2019: How TV types are getting ready to sell 8K, FierceVideo

I wrote this report from two events I’d attended in New York the week before: Insight Media’s 8K Display Summit and then an 8K panel at CE Week.

6/17/2019: Moor Insights & Strategy Podcast (6-17-19), What’s Hot in Tech?

I once again joined Moor analyst Mark Vena on his podcast to talk tech–in this case, 8K TV, the next-generation gaming consoles he saw introduced at the E3 show, and Apple’s WWDC announcements. Yes, we talked about the Mac Pro’s thousand-dollar monitor stand. How could we not?

6/22/2019: June 22, 2019 General Meeting: Rob Pegoraro, Washington Apple Pi

I spoke for about an hour before this Apple user group about the state of Web and smartphone privacy, the prospects of Washington agreeing on any government regulation of same, and the state of tech journalism. (That last bit gave me a chance to talk about my Patreon venture–my latest patron-only post there outlines upcoming stories I’m working on for various clients–and do some in-person salesmanship for it.) And as I did when I spoke to the Pi last summer, I brought a bag full of tech-event swag and gave away almost all of it.

Weekly output: 8K TV, privacy at Google I/O, Waymo

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A week after taking off for the Bay Area to cover Google’s I/O conference, I’m departing for Denver early Monday afternoon. This week’s excuse for propping up the airline industry: moderating a state-of-the-industry panel at the Pay TV Show, in return for which the conference organizers are covering my travel costs.

5/6/2019: Dark clouds invade forecast for 8K TV shipments, FierceVideo

My big takeaway from the IFA Global Press Conference two weeks ago was a dramatically more pessimistic forecast for 8K TV shipments from the research firm IHS Markit. It was refreshing to see analysts decline to get in line behind industry hype over a new product category.

5/8/2019: Google attempts a pivot toward privacy at I/O developer conference, USA Today

For the first time in my experience, USAT didn’t send any of its own reporters to Google’s developer conference, leaving this piece my client’s sole dateline from that event.

5/10/2019: Waymo Doesn’t Mind Being Boring, CityLab

I took a break from I/O Wednesday morning to attend a press event hosted by Waymo, the self-driving-car subsidiary of Google’s parent firm Alphabet. Said event did not feature any time as a passenger in one of Waymo’s autonomous Chrysler Pacifica minivans, because the company apparently still doesn’t have the California permit needed to offer rides to non-employees.

On top of those stories, I also launched a page on the Patreon crowdfunding site. Despite getting no more publicity than a post here Saturday evening and one appreciative tweet afterwards, this experiment already has a non-zero number of supporters pledging to chip in a couple of dollars a month. So I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.

Weekly output: cryptocurrency hack, TV technology (x2), Last Gadget Standing, 2018 cybersecurity forecasts revisited, connected appliances at CES, drones at CES, CES oddities

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I never work harder in a week than during CES, so I immensely appreciated the gift of a snowstorm this weekend that let me get in some cross-country skiing, go sledding with my daughter on the nearest suitable hill and think about work very little.

If you’ve already read all of the posts below, please check out my Flickr album from the show.

1/8/2019: True Confessions: ICOs, Crypto, Tokens and VCs, Digital Money

My spot on this panel track was an onstage interview of cryptocurrency investor Michael Terpin about how a SIM-swap hack led to him being robbed of startup tokens worth almost $24 million at the time.

1/9/2019: Your TV could soon have these features that are better than 8K, Yahoo Finance

Just about every one of the 22 consecutive CESes that I’ve covered has led to me writing a report on the state of the TV. This year’s version involves an unusual company: Apple.

1/10/2019: Last Gadget Standing, Living in Digital Times

Once again, I helped judge this gadget competition and introduced one of the contestants–Origami Labs, developer of the Orii smart ring. This year’s contest, however, featured a new emcee. Instead of my former Yahoo colleague David Pogue, my USA Today colleague Jennifer Jolly did the honors.

1/10/2019: How cybersecurity forecasts got 2018 wrong, The Parallax

Having botched enough tech forecasts of my own, I appreciated having a chance to revisit other people’s predictions for the year we just escaped.

1/11/2019: From a smart toilet to ‘Shazam for Food’: CES unveils new connected appliances, Yahoo Finance

Once Samsung explained how this year’s version of their Family Hub fridge automatically identified food inside visible to its three interior cameras, Silicon Valley’s “Shazam for food” plot line immediately jumped into my head. That also led me to think of the role of hacked smart fridges in the HBO comedy–which made the unwillingness of so many CES smart-home exhibitors to talk specifics about security fixes all the more annoying.

1/11/2019: The drones of CES 2019 aren’t all in the air, Yahoo Finance

I wasn’t sure how I’d end this story until finding myself staring at a an enormous John Deere combine–brought to the show floor to exhibit how GPS guidance lets it drive itself to an extraordinary degree of accuracy. That makes it a very large drone that happens to help bring corn and corn-based products to supermarkets, and there I had my ending.

1/12/2019: 8K TVs show the tech industry indulging in a bad habit, USA Today

This take on TV technology revisited some CES flops of a decade and two decades ago: 3-D TV and the would-be CD-upgrade formats DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD.

1/13/2019: The weirdest tech we saw at CES, Yahoo Finance

I wrote this, along with the two prior stories, after landing at Dulles early Friday morning. It turns out that you can be productive after a red-eye flight home if you pass out for almost the entire flight, nap a couple of times during the day and apply caffeine as needed.

Updated 1/24/2019 with video of my interview of Michael Terpin.

Weekly output: Facebook diet, 8K TV, social-media hearings

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Another trip to Berlin for IFA is in the books, which means I’ve spent another year wondering when Berlin Brandenburg Airport–which was originally scheduled to open before my 2012 introduction to the show–will ever inaugurate scheduled commercial service.

8/28/2018: How to detox from Facebook, Yahoo Finance

I’d had the bones of this piece in mind since sometime after writing a similar how-to on reducing Google’s role in your life. I’m going to guess that most people didn’t install the Facebook Container extension for Firefox (although I am now running that on my Windows laptop), but I do hope that a good fraction of readers opted out of Facebook’s noisier mobile notifications.

Yahoo Finance IFA 8K post9/1/2018: Forget 4K TVs — 8K televisions are already here, Yahoo Finance

If it wasn’t obvious enough the last time I covered this topic: No, I really don’t think anybody should pay extra for 8K resolution, and if this entire format vanishes into consumer irrelevance as 3D TV did, I won’t be too sad. Meanwhile, I appreciated seeing Yahoo give this a little more publicity with a repost on Yahoo Sports.

9/2/2018: What to expect as Google, Facebook and Twitter face Capitol Hill lawmakers, Yahoo Finance

I wrote a curtain-raiser for Wednesday’s grillings of social-media executives in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. Based on how prior House interrogations of tech execs have gone, my expectations for the latter hearing are exceedingly low.

Weekly output: Facebook Messenger scanning, 8K TV, Gmail’s missing features

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Monday begins three weeks of travel: the Collision conference in New Orleans this week, Google I/O in Mountain View next week, and RightsCon in Toronto the week after. They are all good events, but I will be happy to land at National Airport three Fridays from now.

4/25/2018: What Facebook is doing when it looks at your Facebook Messenger photos, USA Today

After weeks of harsh coverage of Facebook, I got to say something halfway nice about the social network in this column. By “nice,” I mean “Facebook is no more evil than other big tech companies in this area.”

4/25/2018: 8K TVs are coming, but don’t buy the hype, Yahoo Finance

My recap of Sharp’s 8K pitch at the IFA Global Press Conference in Rome seems to have landed on a nerve, if the 400-plus comments are any sign. Engadget (like Yahoo Finance, owned by Verizon) picked up the post and re-ran it.

4/25/2018: Gmail still lacks these important features. Yahoo Finance

I wrote this story in record time–because I’ve been grumbling for years about Gmail’s failure to deliver some otherwise industry-standard features.