PHANTOM'S FINAL WORD Archives

UHDTV — A Tale of Three Standards

By the PHANTOM – The NTSC transmitters have been turned off and the masses are viewing only ATSC signals (modified for cable where appropriate). The land should have been at peace.

UHDTV

By the PHANTOM – Broadcasters are in a different situation from us. That difference arises from the way that economics work in their part of the infrastructure. Broadcasters own nothing in the viewers’ homes.

Competition — Again

By the PHANTOM – Now any decent marketing type will tell you that it is a whole lot cheaper to keep a customer than it is to acquire a new one. The reason is that you spend so much moolah on getting a new customer — advertising, installation, introductory discounts, and so on ad nauseam.

Boy Did I Get a Wrong Number!

By The Phantom – That was the name of this Bob Hope flick of the mid-’60s, in which Bob calls his wife on the phone, but accidentally gets a French movie star who has escaped to the U.S. As only Hope can do it, one thing leads to another and Hope finds himself in a hilarious pickle.

Now Where Was I? (Part 2)

Phantom – Guess I’d better find another industry to haunt if the phantom bosses decide to put me back into the programming business. Lemme think: How did I pull off the switch from that French opera house gig to this cable gig?

That What Brought Us

By The Phantom – Don’t believe me about the polarization thing? Hold a pair of polarized sunglasses backwards over one eye and rotate them 90 degrees while watching an LCD screen.

Is There a Contortionist in the House?

By The Phantom — The company found that productivity in many cases went up, not down as many bosses had feared. Employees learned the joy of working in PJs.

A Repeat

By The Phantom — Fast forward a century, we are in a pandemic, a divisive political season, and are dealing with a rapidly-changing technology landscape brought about by a technology for interconnecting computers, televisions, and other appliances not imagined earlier in our lifetimes.

King of the Hill

By The Phantom — HFC technology as knocking twisted pair off the hill, but you’d be making a fatal mistake if you thought that we can stay on the hill forever

Artificial What???

By The Phantom — So, we keep hearing all this stuff about artificial intelligence (AI). Here we are, talking about artificial intelligence, and we haven’t gotten the real thing figured out yet.