The inauguration of the 44th president was to be a highlight event for net weenies. They expected to enjoy full HD, full-screen streaming video right to their office or home PC. Tens of millions of people expected to watch the day’s events on their desktops. Why bother with old-fashioned broadcast channels? Let the Web deliver the news, right?

Wrong.

While many net users perceived the event as the culmination of net over broadcast, when it came time to deliver the goods, the Internet failed miserably. The cause for that failure is something with which we broadcasters are quite familiar. It’s called bandwidth.

It matters not whether there is one viewer or there are 1 billion viewers, a single TV transmitter can theoretically reach every one of them and never burp. It doesn’t cost one penny more or require one extra hertz of bandwidth to reach as many people as you want because it is broadcast. That old-fashioned one-to-many communication model many think died in 1999 when Al Gore created the Internet still works beautifully. more

Hang on to your wallets; the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) is about to become law. This mammoth, 258-page bill makes all other government spending look like peanuts.

I downloaded the monster bill to read a few pages. The first topic I searched for was the DTV conversion process. Yep, the politicians have got that covered. Here’s what the ARRA bill says about DTV funding (on page 47):

DIGITAL-TO-ANALOG CONVERTER BOX PROGRAM

Notwithstanding any other provision of law, and in addition to amounts otherwise provided in any other Act, for costs associated with the Digital-to-Analog Converter Box Program, $650,000,000, to be available until September 30, 2009: Provided , That these funds shall be available for coupons and related activities, including but not limited to education, consumer support and outreach, as deemed appropriate and necessary to ensure a timely conversion of analog to digital television.

That’s it! These 71 words result in the spending of $650 million. That’s almost $10 million per word. more

OMG! The DTV sky is falling! The sky is falling! That seems to be the scuttlebutt from politicians and pundits as the analog cutoff date of Feb. 17 approaches.

“There may be 8 million households without TV service if we don’t do something,” said Senator Feather.

“Why, yes, I totally agree”, said Congresswoman Hen-Beak. “The sky is falling, and Congress must do something.”

The remainder of the barnyard chickens (collectively called Congress) all clucked, “Yes, yes, we must do something now. Quick, let’s throw money at it.”

If the issue of finally moving to all-digital OTA operations weren’t so important, we industry professionals could just laugh at those Washington idiots. To them, everything is a crisis, and every solution is to spend more of our money.

In my April 2008 editorial, “ The blame game ,” I predicted that the key players — NAB, NTIA, Congress and the FCC — would all be blaming each other for any DTV implementation problems. Guess what? The battle is now in full force. Everyone is crying for more money to be spent, blaming others for the looming deadline and asking why viewers haven’t complied by getting DTV converters. more

Nothing gets a politician more excited than the smell of money.

Despite predictions of doom and gloom for the nation’s 2009 economy, city and state bureaucrats across the country are practically salivating for the new president to take office. These politicians know that the incoming president has promised billions in federal money to pay for a wide variety of what he calls “shovel ready” projects.

To ensure they are first on Obama’s grant list, the U.S. Conference of Mayors issued on Dec. 19, a report titled, “ Main Street Economic Recovery: ‘Ready to go’ Jobs and Infrastructure Projects .” This mammoth, 1494-page wish list contains 15,221 projects for 641 U.S. cities. The mayors claim the projects would create more than 1.2 million jobs over a two-year period. The cost for these ready-to-go and imperative projects? Almost $100 billion!

If approved, taxpayer money will be used to build solar-heated swimming pools in Hawaii, solar-heated roads in Alabama, a $600 million radio for L.A. cops and a $1.5 million waterslide in Florida. These are among what amounts to a virtual grab bag of requests from U.S. mayors. more

Watching Internet video is not my cup of tea. Even so, I did find myself one night recently watching an interview conducted by CNBC’s David Faber with NBC Universal’s CEO Jeff Zucker. Faber noted a previous comment by Zucker that a digital strategy is difficult, in part, because you are exchanging analog dollars for digital pennies. Zucker said that statement could be updated to “analog dollars for digital dimes,” but that still is mere cents on the dollar. Given that his NBC network realized more than $1 billion in revenue from the Olympic broadcasts this year, one can appreciate his concern about exchanging dollars for dimes.

During this interview, Zucker described the industry’s digital dilemma. The gist of what he said was that a digital strategy is difficult, in part, because you are exchanging analog dollars for digital dimes. Digital is a growth area, but it’s not experienced the fast growth many people expected. So, digital will grow, but he said it’s not going to be the opportunity people thought it was, certainly in the short term.

Is Zucker right? Were broadcasters foolish to have spent $20 billion building huge digital delivery and production infrastructures? Will they only receive pennies and dimes in return? Is there any ROI on this digital investment? Let’s peek into one researcher’s crystal ball. more

What if your prime-time TV shows were only offered at say, 3 a.m.? Would you stay up all night just to watch “Boston Legal” or “CSI:NY”? Instead, what if most of the television available during your evening prime time were infomercials? Most viewers certainly wouldn’t hurry home from work to watch TV.

Ask yourself why any broadcaster would air the best TV shows during the overnight and schedule infomercials and junk TV during the day and in evening prime time? Add nine hours to your local time and you’ll begin to discover the problem. more

I’m typing with clinched teeth this morning as the news reports continue nonstop about the automotive industry’s demand that taxpayers bail out its poorly managed, high-union-labor-cost industry. One pundit called giving the automakers any bailout simply pouring bad money into a black hole. He continued by asking what do you get after $25 billion? His answer: the same bankrupt, inefficient, high-labor-cost industry, making cars people don’t want.

It seems to me that most of the industries clamoring for tax dollars are looking to be saved from their own greed. A recent example shows how one company responded when the government rode in to rescue it from its own bad decisions. The insurance giant, AIG, was called too big to let fail, so in early September, the government loaned AIG $85 billion.

Read the rest in our online magazine archive.

I watched as a quite familiar company began installing a backup power generator for the building. It took several months, but was finally connected and ready for operation.

It was tested several times and the all-knowing IT department experts said everything was good-to-go. BTW, this installation was not a broadcast site, but you may know the company.

About three weeks after the system was declared ready for service, the building suffered a power failure. Let’s see what happened. more

Some of my jogging friends teasingly tell me I have CRD, which stand for Compulsive Running Disorder. Much like OCD, which is a repeated behavior, like washing your hands 50 times a day, my CRD is running.

Day, night, rain, snow, doesn’t matter, give me a new location and I’m off and running. I use the hobby to explore new cities and locations. I’ve run in the majestic shadow of the Swiss mountains, along Lake Geneva. I’ve run down the busy streets of Beijing. I’ve run across all but one major bridge in New York and along the East River. I’ve run in dangerous neighborhoods and rich neighborhoods, foreign lands and across the U.S. I’ve even gotten lost in our nation’s capitol and was forced to ask White House guards to help me find my hotel. The problem was, I couldn’t remember the name of the hotel. But, that’s another story. In races from the East Coast to the Midwest, I’ve run up to 2200 miles in one year, sometimes 100 miles a week. When it’s time to run, I gotta go run, no matter what. more