Tech Roundup

The FCC has launched a new Honors Engineer Program to recruit current students and recent engineering school graduates to the FCC and into the forefront of the technology and communications fields.

At the end of 2013, more than 60% of the U.S. population owned a smartphone. The latest research showed that many of them are actively researching local businesses on the fly. That led Martin Kristiseter, today a senior VP at Marketron Digital, to pen a Media Information Bureau column that concludes Radio, whose audiences are predominantly local, can play a huge role in leveraging mobile to help local retail. In turn, mobile, which is far-reaching, can boost local radio. We revisit Kristiseter's column more than four years later, as his advice still holds true today.

Kurt Rao has become the newest executive at TEGNA, the broadcast TV company formerly known as Gannett. Starting today, he's the Chief Technology Officer for the company, working across TEGNA "to drive the development and implementation of the company’s next-generation client and customer technology solutions."

On the first day of the 2018 NAB Show, which officially began April 9, LG Electronics was in a festive mood. The South Korean company's R&D leader was at the Las Vegas Convention Center and joined the AWARN Alliance, NAB and RAPA, South Korea’s broadcast promotion association, to celebrate the signing of a landmark memorandum of understanding regarding international cooperation on advanced emergency alerting powered by the new next gen TV standard and the Advanced Warning and Response Network.

Effective immediately, company founder and CEO Ramki Sankaranarayanan will operate from the U.S. headquarters in a westside suburb of Los Angeles. The move is designed to boost U.S. sales for CLEARTM, and build on a U.S. market focus that came with the acquisition of cloud-based production workflow and media asset management (MAM) applications provider DAX.

Broadcast TV station owner TEGNA and its over-the-top (OTT) advertising services platform Premion have launched a proprietarily-built data management platform (DMP) that includes 2,000 first-party unique OTT audience segments.

TV reception company Channel Master is joining the Phoenix Model Market initiative—the first collaborative single-market effort to plan for and implement a transition to next-generation over-the-air television broadcasting. Eleven Phoenix stations are currently involved with the project, which seeks to develop a method to bring new services to viewers while maintaining current TV programs.

A new series of flagship multimedia receivers that got their first public view at the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas is now available for purchase from Kenwood USA.

The big news out of the 2018 NAB Show for Germany-based Rohde & Schwarz is centered on the expansion of its media server platform for studio production and playout applications.

TV stations owned by Gray Television, Hubbard Broadcasting and The E. W. Scripps Company now have a little programmatic power boost thanks to their respective new links to ITN Holdings' ProVantageX (PVX) platform.

Xperi Corporation subsidiary DTS, the parent of HD Radio, is teaming up with broadcast software company RCS to develop and integrate DTS Connected Radio technology into their family of radio automation and production platforms. The DTS Connected Radio platform, Calabasas, Calif.-based Xperi says, "will enable broadcasters to deliver new and engaging services into connected cars of the future."

An AI-driven tech company "transforming TV advertising for the connected world" has partnered up with a top ATSC 3.0 Next Gen TV platform company to develop the standard for interactive advertising formats to be delivered over the ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee) 3.0 standard.

Hive, an advanced tech company that uses AI to identify and capture metadata related to TV content through its Hive Media platform, has partnered on a joint offering with advanced data and analytics company 605, which focuses its efforts on the media and entertainment industries. The joint offering is designed to provide deeper insights into both paid and earned media on television, the companies note.

Looking for a new captioning tool for live and taped streaming content for your station? The 2018 NAB Show has one vendor that just might be right for you. Humboldt County, Calif.-based StreamGuys is previewing its forthcoming audio transcription features in its SGrecast live stream recording and repurposing platform, powered by ENCO’s enCaption4 cloud-based, automated captioning tool.

With a front-and-center "can't miss 'em" spot once again, located just outside the North Hall entrance of the Las Vegas Convention Center, Ooyala will certainly gain a lot of passersby and broadcast media execs interested in new ways to monetize short- and long-form video through their digital and social media platforms.