This year’s show, which runs Jan. 9-12, should be bigger than the 2023 edition. That show drew 117,000 attendees and 3,200 exhibitors and represented a significant bounce-back from the 45,000 attendees and 2,300 exhibitors that came in 2022, the first show after a one-year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Consumer Technology Association (CTA), which owns and produces CES and is celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2024, is projecting attendance to be 130,000 with more than 3,500 exhibitors.

“We are seeing huge momentum for CES 2024,” says Kinsey Fabrizio, CTA senior vice president of CES and membership.

A Bigger Footprint

As of early December, CTA had already booked 2.4 million net square feet of exhibit space, Fabrizio says, which is over a 10% jump from CES 2023. The CES 2024 exhibition and conference will be spread across the North, Central and West Halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center as well as several Las Vegas hotels, including 1,000 startup companies exhibiting in “Eureka Park” at the Venetian. Over half of Fortune 500 companies will be in attendance, including Amazon, Google, Intel, Qualcomm, LG, Samsung and Sony.

AI’s Big Year

AI is the “hottest topic in the tech industry right now,” says John Kelley, VP and show director, CES. AI will be “pervasive” across the show floor and conference sessions, Kelley says, including a keynote from Intel CEO Patrick Gelsinger discussing the critical role that chips and software play in making AI more accessible.

“What’s changed in the last year is generative AI has taken the world by storm, and every company is thinking about how to use it,” says CTA President-CEO Gary Shapiro. “And I know many, many, many companies are going to be talking about AI and introducing and showing products that take advantage of that.”

Another growth area for CES is automotive and mobility, Kelley says, with more than 300 companies exhibiting in an at-capacity West Hall including Honda, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai and Kia. The “C Space” Entertainment and Content conference at the Aria, which features brands like Amazon Ads, Netflix, NBC Universal, Roku and Snap, has also expanded with additional space in the Cosmopolitan hotel this year including new exhibitors Disney, NVIDIA, Paramount and Reddit.

Noteworthy “C Space” panels for broadcasters include “2024: The AI Inflection Point — Entertainment, Internet & Media” featuring Steve Canepa, GM, Global Industries, IBM and Richard Kerris, VP/GM, media and entertainment, NVIDIA; “Future of TV & Streaming: Cable, Internet TV & FAST Strategies,” with executives from Tubi, Disney, PBS and Nielsen; “Monetizing the TV/Streaming, Programming Platforms: The Strategies” with executives from Uber, Amazon Ads, Vizio, Disney and Estrella Media; and “Transforming An All-American Brand: Technology Inside The Weather Channel,” with Tom O’Brien, EVP, Allen Media Group; Nora Zimmett, president, news and original series, Allen Media Group; and Alexandra Wilson, meteorologist, The Weather Company.

‘A Good Way To Kick Off The Year’

With many top network and station group executives at CES, many media technology vendors will also be there, if not to exhibit but to simply meet with their customers and partners. One of them is IP transport provider Zixi, which has been experiencing big growth in its live event business due to the explosion in streaming sports coverage. Zixi won’t have a booth or suite at CES but is still sending a team of six, including members of its executive team as well as technical support personnel. That is double the number of people it sent in 2023.

“The number of companies that is going is starting to grow again,” says John Wastcoat, Zixi SVP business development and marketing. “We’re not going to be able to handle it with just a handful of people this year, so that’s why we’re doubling our team that’s going to go out and meet with everybody. And it’s an easy hop from L.A., so people can make a day trip if they need to … they’ll be in and have three or four meetings and be out, without a significant investment.”

Zixi has two motivations to attend CES that are interconnected.

“One is that our customers and our partners are looking for different ways to monetize their content,” Wastcoat says. “That could be sending it directly to a new smart TV, we do that with Bloomberg around the world. We have conversations with the automobile manufacturers about sending content directly to their screens as well. So, we’ve got that angle.

“And then our customers and partners are still looking at what’s going to be new and interesting for them over the next few years,” he adds. “So, we’re there to talk with them about what we need to do together in 2024, whether that aligns with anything that’s found at CES or not. But it’s a good way to kick off the year.”

While over time the overall focus at CES has shifted away from television sets and Blu-ray players to a range of different consumer technology products, Zixi is still very interested in how its IP transport technology integrates with TV sets to deliver programming to the living room.

“We are seeing a tremendous increase in our business because of the reallocation of sports rights to digital-first platforms that didn’t have infrastructure for it before,” Wastcoat says. “We’re forecasting a million live sports events in 2024 that will use Zixi, and two years ago we probably would have said we’re not very interested in occasional use business like that, we’re looking for the 24/7 constant traffic. But it has become such a volume pay that it has got our attention. So, companies like Amazon Prime [Video] are coming to us and asking us for new features and functionality, like scheduling tools to be able to manage these thousands of events that they’re doing.”

Another broadcast vendor making the trip is robotic camera specialist Mark Roberts Motion Control (MRMC), which will be exhibiting in the booth of its parent company Nikon. MRMC will once again collaborate with virtual production specialist Vu Studios to deliver the “Unreal Ride.” For CES 2024 the Unreal Ride environment will take place in a virtual jungle, where participants will get to experience the thrill of riding through it in a futuristic Jeep and once again be able to take away a video of themselves travelling through the virtual world.

MRMC’s technology can also be seen elsewhere on the show floor as several companies rent MRMC’s robotic arms just to draw attention to their booths.

“One of them has a light wand on it, and it attracts people because they see it doing funny patterns,” says Paddy Taylor, MRMC head of broadcast.

While MRMC does makes some products that it is actively marketing at CES, such as automatic tracking software and low-cost sliders for PTZ cameras, Taylor doesn’t expect to get many new customers for the company’s high-end specialized robotics at CES.

“It’s more of a positioning exercise,” Taylor says.

One of the messages that MRMC is looking to get across is that Nikon is serious about video, as more broadcasters and other professional videographers start to use DSLR-style cameras for content capture.

“With the Z 9 Nikon probably has the best DSLR-style mirrorless camera for video, and Nikon’s starting to make a really big thing about that,” Taylor says. “And we’re doing some things to move that camera and make it do interesting things.”

The other message that Taylor wants to emphasize is that MRMC expects full-frame cameras like the Sony HDC-F5500, which use the same type of large sensors as digital cinema cameras, will start to be used en masse in broadcast production in 2024 to provide a different look for live sports and news. And MRMC sees an opportunity there for its robotic systems.

“We have a few customers using Sony Venice [digital cinema cameras] with our robotics, but in live current affairs and sports studios,” Taylor says. “And I think with the Olympics and a few other events next year you’ve got more full-frame system cameras coming onto the market. You’re going to see a marry-up, where people are trying to mix different types of full-frame cameras in different workflows for sporting events, festivals, concerts — anything with a creative edge people are trying to strive for.”

New Services For NextGen TV

Broadcasters will also use CES 2024 to promote the continued rollout of the ATSC 3.0, or NextGen TV, digital television standard through demonstrations put on by ATSC and the Pearl TV coalition of station groups.

“There’s going to be a focus on the consumer, both on the services side and device side,” says ATSC President Madeleine Noland. “You’re going to see a proliferation of devices, more set-top boxes, more television models and a few extras.”

NextGen launched in 12 more markets in 2023, including top 10 markets Philadelphia and New York, and CTA says that 10 million NextGen TV sets have been sold in the U.S. to date. With planned launches in Chicago, San Diego and Tucson coming next month, 3.0 signals should be lit up in 75 markets covering 75% of U.S. TV households by the end of January, Noland says. She notes that 3.0 is also making significant progress internationally, with Brazil having chosen 3.0 technology for most of its new mandated digital TV standard and a final decision on the physical, or RF transmission, layer due next year.

Big Four networks ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC are all sponsors of the ATSC booth in Central Hall, which will have 13 different TV models, four different set-tops and one prototype mobile phone. The booth will also feature various demonstrations of high dynamic range (HDR) and enhanced audio content, including an “immersive entertainment room” sponsored by Dolby and major-league sports programming. There will also be a mosaic of various interactive applications enabled by 3.0’s broadband backchannel including “Start Over” capability developed by E.W. Scripps; an interactive music service from Sinclair; and sports statistics, gaming and news applications.

“What you’ll see at CES are almost fully-baked services that will hit the consumer this year, the gaming applications, the sports interactivity, the Start Over application,” says Mark Aitken, president, ONE Media and SVP of advanced technology for Sinclair. “There are a number of broadcasters, beyond us, who are now beyond the planning phase of adding HDR to their programming. Some of these become more and more relevant in respect to sports coming back to local broadcasting.”

Another new capability that ATSC and Pearl TV will be demonstrating is “broadcast IP,” which is a way to deliver a local station’s enhanced 3.0 programming to a 3.0 TV set as a “virtual channel” over broadband. This is a capability that is particularly important given the current spectrum landscape for 3.0, where often there is not enough capacity for every station that wants to offer 3.0 to be supported in a market.

Pearl TV first tested broadcast IP in Phoenix several years ago, says Pearl TV Managing Director Anne Schelle, working with set makers LG, Sony and Samsung, and successfully deployed it last spring for South Florida PBS’s stations in Miami.

The way that broadcast IP works is that a host 3.0 station transmits tiny bits of metadata within its over-the-air stream that can be picked up by a NextGen TV set and point to an internet server carrying the “virtual channel” of another station in the market that isn’t actually broadcasting in 3.0 due to capacity constraints. The virtual channel is displayed like a 3.0 channel in the over-the-air electronic program guide (EPG) on the NextGen TV set. When a viewer clicks on it that station’s 3.0 programming is then streamed to the set via the broadband connection.

However, the broadcast IP “virtual channel” shouldn’t be thought of as simply another FAST or streaming channel because it’s only available through the OTA guide, Schelle says. And it does require an agreement between two stations to enable transmission of the “tiny bits” of data necessary for the guide info.

“Our first goal was to bring up the PBS stations in South Florida to ensure that TVs can see it,” Schelle says. “It’s geofenced, you’re transmitting the URL in your stream, and it goes out and grabs the content from a server and puts it up in the OTA EPG. But you can only get it if you have antenna, you can’t get it otherwise.”

In Las Vegas, Sinclair is working with Gray Television and Fox to enable the broadcast IP transmission of KVVU, Gray’s Fox affiliate in the market, which couldn’t find traditional RF capacity for 3.0 programming.

“They want to offer their Fox station in 3.0 so they can enhance it with the same capabilities as if they were on-air in 3.0, to do 1080p and HDR, or even do 4K,” Schelle says. “They can also do [interactive] applications, the RUN3TV app works in the IP channel as well. They can basically do everything they can do in 3.0.”

The post For Broadcasters And Their Vendors, AI And IP Delivery Are Top Of Mind At CES appeared first on TV News Check.

“The Trump administration’s ‘strategy’ of using tariffs to punish China for intellectual property theft and forced technology transfer is not working. Instead, it is damaging to American businesses and consumers. Not only is the White House failing to change China’s behavior on IP, but it is also putting extreme pressure on American innovation and businesses that invent, design and engineer their IP in the United States.

“Tariffs are a tax on Americans and are paid to the detriment of the U.S. economy, workers and consumers. A study done earlier this year shows tariffs on $50 billion of Chinese imports — coupled with retaliation by China — would reduce U.S. GDP by nearly $3 billion annually and put hundreds of thousands of American jobs at risk. No wonder 90% of economist say tariffs will hurt us.

“The Trump administration has prioritized economic policies — such as tax reform — to help American workers and businesses. But if the administration continues to implement tariffs, our country will face a weaker economy, job losses and American families stuck with a higher cost of living.”

The post CTA Calls For End To Trump Tariff Strategy appeared first on TV News Check.

At the 2015 ATSC Broadcast Television Conference on May 14, the three top industry executives — Gordon Smith, president-CEO of the NAB; Michael Powell, president-CEO of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association; and Gary Shapiro, president-CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association — will come together.

The Future of Television Super Panel, bringing these three industry luminaries onstage together for the first time, will be moderated by Richard E. Wiley, chairman of WileyRein and former FCC chairman and former chairman of the FCC’s Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Service,.

Registration for the May 14 conference is open now.

“Every pundit seems to have an opinion about where TV is going, with new technologies creating new business opportunities, with a new regulatory environment, and with Internet connectivity having a profound influence on broadcasters, pay-TV operators, and device manufacturers,” said ATSC President Mark Richer.  “At the 2015 ATSC Broadcast TV Conference, we are thrilled to bring together Gordon Smith, Michael Powell and Gary Shapiro to share their views on the future of television.  We’re asking these three remarkable industry leaders to share their predictions about the future, and while they may not always agree, I am certain that ATSC conference attendees will get a well-rounded view of how the television landscape is changing.”

The Super Panel will be a centerpiece of the day-long ATSC conference at the Reagan International Commerce Center in Washington. Under the banner “Tune In to the Future,” the 2015 ATSC Broadcast Television Conference also will feature a broadcast executive roundtable addressing strategic business issues surrounding the incentive auction and the future of broadcast television, as well as presentations on the status of ATSC 3.0, industry research reports and presentation of the Bernard J. Lechner Outstanding Contributor award .  The full agenda will be published in April.

For those who want a more comprehensive overview of the evolving ATSC 3.0 standard and its various layers of physical transmission, management protocols, and audio, the ATSC will host its “ATSC 3.0 Bootcamp” on the eve of the ATSC Broadcast TV Conference. Back by popular demand, this seminar and workshop, also at the Reagan Center, brings together the leaders in the development of the next-generation broadcast standard.

“The May 13 ATSC 3.0 Bootcamp will be an ideal place for a deep technical dive on the current status of the standardization effort, from the soon-to-arrive Candidate Standards that will face real-world trials to remaining elements that must be investigated and evaluated as the full ATSC 3.0 standard is finalized in the months ahead,” Richer explained.

Registration for the Wednesday, May 13 ATSC 3.0 Bootcamp is also open now.

The ATSC is in the process of developing the next-generation ATSC 3.0 terrestrial television broadcast standard with advanced performance and functionality made possible by new technologies and strategies. This next-generation standard must provide improvements in performance, functionality and efficiency that are significant enough to warrant the challenges of a transition to a new system.

“As a standards-setting organization, we have scores of experts working now to set the standard for ATSC 3.0, the broadcast TV standard that over-the-air broadcasters will use to deliver new content, reach more viewers on the go, and enhance the viewing and listening experience with 4K Ultra HD video and immersive audio,” Richer said.

“We fully expect ATSC 3.0 to be more flexible for broadcasters and more useful to a connected consumer,” he added. “The new standard will also be a superb pipe for delivering more channels of content and also instantaneously reaching millions of viewers at one moment — which is truly broadcasting’s biggest benefit and has proven to be a lifesaver in emergency situations,”

The post ATSC To Bring Media Trade Chiefs Together appeared first on TV News Check.

“We are at a pivotal point in consumer behavior, as fewer and fewer American homes are now using only antennas to watch their favorite television programs, and more and more households turn to the Internet as a source of TV content,” said Gary Shapiro, president-CEO, CEA. “In 1986, more than half of American homes with a TV relied solely on free, over-the-air broadcasting. But our study reveals that just 6% of U.S. TV households now watch TV programming exclusively through an over-the-air signal. This continues a nine-year, downward trend that shows antenna-only viewership remains at all-time lows and an upward trend of consumers watching video programming when and where they choose.”

The study shows the percentage of U.S. TV households consuming at least some TV programming via the Internet has nearly doubled. Almost half of U.S. TV households (45%) received at least some television programming from the Internet in the last year, a 17 point increase from the previous year (28%).

“In the next year, we expect the number of U.S. households relying exclusively on the Internet for TV programming to equal or surpass the total of those relying only on antennas,” Shapiro said. “As consumers continue to turn to other devices and services for TV programming  — devices that need wireless spectrum to deliver the content we want anytime, anywhere — it’s clear that the free, public spectrum given to broadcasters could be put to much better use.”

In response to the CEA study, NAB EVP of Communications Dennis Wharton said: “NAB now strictly adheres to a policy of responding to only one out of five distortions and/or self-serving studies commissioned by CEA. For that reason, we respectfully decline comment except to note that the cord-cutting phenomenon and growth in over-the-air TV antenna sales seems to have escaped our friends at CEA.”

Despite growth in tablet and smartphone penetration rates, televisions are still the most widely used viewing devices, according to the study. TVs have the highest household penetration of any viewing devices (97%) and strongest video content viewership (93%), especially now that Internet-enabled televisions have reached mainstream consumers.

“The television remains the most commonly owned video viewing device and our primary means of watching video content,” said Brian Markwalter, SVP, research and standards, CEA. “But significantly more households that use televisions to watch TV programming are now also turning to alternative video devices at home. The explosive growth of Internet programming means consumers now have better options to watch video content on different types of screens they may own.”

According to the study, viewership of video programming on connected devices continues to grow. Nearly half of TV user households watched video on either a portable computer or smartphone in the last year, and more than a third watched on either a tablet or desktop computer. Specifically:

• 46% of U.S. TV user households watched video on either a laptop, notebook or netbook (up from 38% in 2013)

• 43% watched video on a smartphone (up from 33% in 2013)

• 35% watched video on a tablet (up from 26% in 2013)

• 34% watched video on a desktop computer (up from 30% in 2013)

The post Internet TV Delivery Set To Pass OTA TV appeared first on TV News Check.

One was that the best video of the actual bombing came not from a broadcaster, but from a sports producer for The Boston Globe’s boston.com who was on routine assignment. His name is Steve Silva.

You’ve all seen the video many times by now. It’s been everywhere. The remarkable thing about it that when the first bomb goes off, Silva immediately moves in to get a closer look at the bomb site and he doesn’t high-tail it out of there even after the second bomb goes off. If you haven’t seen the raw video, do so here. Through a good pair of computer speakers, the audio tells a story all its own.

The video is the most vivid reminder yet that broadcasters are no longer alone in shooting news video on a professional basis. Newspapers and other local digital media are out there too now armed with cameras and may be just as aggressive in getting the right shot. And as Silva demonstrated, they don’t need a long lens.

When terrorist bombs go off, nobody’s really keeping score on who got the beats, video or otherwise. But on most other stories, everybody is. To keep up with the proliferating competitions, stations have to keep as many cameras on the street as they can. I guess it also goes without saying that stations have to be ready to compete for the user-generated video that became such a big part of the Boston story.

The other point I want to make is, on that Monday when the bombs went off, and that Thursday-Friday when one suspect was killed and the other captured, the broadcast networks got in the way on the story. From my perch in New York, it was clear the best coverage of the unfolding events was coming from the Boston stations. I know this because I would periodically watch local streams online and because the networks would occasionally cut to their Boston affiliates. My question is, why did they cut back?

The network anchors and their reporters in Boston had nothing to add, especially when the story was building to its Friday evening climax. My feelings were confirmed when Allbritton’s Politico.com reported that White House officials were tracking the story via the local stations, not the networks.

Next time, and I’m afraid there will be a next time, the networks should think about turning the screen over to their affiliates who know the local geography, know the local authorities and have the trust of local viewers who are more apt to call their favorite local station with eyewitness accounts and video than remote networks.

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One of the drawbacks of waiting until Friday to write my column is that I can get beat to the punch. That happened this week. I was going to go after CEA President and broadcast nemesis Gary Shapiro for the speech he gave at the Media Institute on Monday in which he rebuked broadcasters for obstructing what he sees as more dynamic industries like wireless and for its failure to innovate. He also offered broadcasters some unsolicited advice, which can be safely ignored.

But Deborah McAdams of TV Technology did a clever and effective job slicing and dicing the speech and NAB widely circulated it. I would add only that Shapiro’s concept of innovation is rather narrow. Shapiro credits broadcasters for its Boston coverage (how could he not), but he fails to credit those same broadcasters for what goes into executing such coverage.

What the Boston stations did last week was the result of experience, planning and, yes, continual innovation. Getting reporters to the scene, getting live pictures back to the station and getting it out to viewers in different forms on multiple platforms nearly simultaneously is a technological marvel.

I guess Shapiro can’t see it because you can’t sell it in a big box store.

By the way, we supplied more evidence of broadcasters’ inventiveness with our story Thursday on Gray Television’s experiment on sending video back from the field using a market-wide IP network. GrayMax could be the next step in the 40-year evolution of ENG, if broadcasters can keep the ravenous wireless carriers from siphoning off broadcast ENG spectrum.

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Too much has been said and seen this week of A.J. Clemente, who turned the worst debut in broadcasting history into a spasm of celebrity. After being fired by Hoak Media’s KFYR Bismarck, N.D., Clemente quickly made the leap from online phenom to mainstream darling appearing on Today, Live with Kelly and Michael and Letterman.

There is a lesson in this for the industry that I missed, but that Tampa Bay Times TV critic Eric Deggans did not.

“What his mistake really reveals … is just how low the quality of local TV news is in Bismarck, the 151th TV market in the country — leaving larger questions about how badly the modern media environment has hurt small TV news operations,” Deggans writes in his blog.

“The clips of Clemente’s mistake also reveal a weekend news broadcast which looks little better than a college telecom assignment, with thin-sounding audio and co-anchors with scarcely more poise than newbie Clemente. The new anchor’s name was even misspelled in the on air graphic displayed beneath his image while he was making his big mistake, leaving a period off the ‘J.'”

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A few weeks ago, former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt called on broadcasters to apply pressure on Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder to change the name of his team by refusing to use it. “Almost all of us adults who grew up as Washington football fans used, without thinking, a name for the hometown team that is now clearly inappropriate. Whatever we might have said decades ago, none of us now would call a Native American by the epithet used to describe Snyder’s team,” Hundt wrote.

I’ll second that, and I have standing. I’ve been a fan of the Redskins since the 1960s when my Dad bought a couple of season tickets (still in the family) and began taking his four sons to DC Stadium. Those were the great days of Sonny Jurgensen and Charlie Taylor and Sam Huff that culminated on New Year’s Eve 1972 when George Allen’s over-the-hill gang beat Dallas for the NFC championship and touched off a city-wide party. (We don’t talk about that Super Bowl.)

One of Snyder’s arguments for keeping the name is tradition. But if you delve into the Redskins’ history, you find that that is the worst possible argument. Redskins founder George Preston Marshall, who christened the team, was the last NFL owner to integrate his team with the signing of Bobby Mitchell in 1962. If Marshall was not an outright racist, he was moral coward who discriminated against African-Americans to cater to his southern fan base. Breaking with that kind of tradition is no loss.

With his call, I think Hundt had network broadcasters in mind, the NFL rights holders. But I’m thinking that the local Washington broadcasters should lead the way, two in particular — Gannett, which owns CBS affiliate WUSA, and Allbritton, which runs ABC affiliate WJLA. Both groups are based in Washington. If they would refuse to use the name and repeatedly told viewers why, things would start moving in the right direction. Snyder would wake up.

If it will help, I’ll come up with new words for the fight song.

Harry A. Jessell is editor of TVNewsCheck. He can be contacted at 973-701-1067 or hajessell@newscheckmedia.com. You can read earlier columns here.

The post Thoughts On Boston, Shapiro, A.J., Epithets appeared first on TV News Check.

“Recent statements discouraging participation in and support of these auctions are not only inconsistent with the goals of Congress, but also are not helpful to competition necessary for a successful and competitive auction,” said Shapiro in an open letter to his counterpart in broadcasting.

“You noted in your NAB keynote that you  ‘don’t envy the commission its job; implementation of the legislation is daunting and will take years to complete,’ which isn’t a ringing endorsement of the upcoming auctions.

“Nor are statements to press that ‘we’ve heard no hooves of a stampede. I find our members excited about their business, their futures and anxious to hold on to their spectrum.’ ”

Earlier this year, Congress authorized the FCC to conduct an auction of any spectrum that TV stations voluntarily make available and to share the proceeds with those broadcasters.

Like the FCC, Shapiro hopes that the auction will result in the reallocation of a large part of the TV band to wireless broadband service where, they feel, it will be put to better and more efficient use.

Shapiro also reminded Smith that broadcasters don’t own their spectrum. “Congress was extraordinarily generous in allowing broadcasters to be compensated for these limited duration licenses should they choose to offer them for auction.”

NAB spokesman Dennis Wharton dismissed Shapiro’s complaint. “NAB supported the voluntary incentive auction legislation passed by Congress and looks forward to working with the FCC and Congress to implement the bill.”

The post Shapiro Chides Smith Over Auction Remarks appeared first on TV News Check.

The Comeback: How Innovation Will Restore the American Dream (Beaufort Books) is a right-of-center policy guide for saving America by spurring technological innovation. It’s worth a read — concise, clear, thoughtful, and provocative. If you are a thinking person, you will agree with some of the prescriptions, scoff at others.

Shapiro says the book was inspired by a run-in a couple years ago with a Chinese official at a banquet who was upset about the impact the sub-prime mortgage meltdown was having on the Chinese economy. The official pointed his thumb up. “China going up,” he said in English. Then he turned his thumb toward the floor. “U.S. going down.”

At first the incident made him angry, Shapiro says. But he eventually accepted it as true and that set him to thinking about how to get things in American moving in the right direction again. Hence, the book.

Now, you would think that a guy who just wrote a book on innovation, would at least know it when he sees it. But he has a big blind spot.

Right there in the middle of the Central Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center, broadcasters’ Open Mobile Video Coalition showcased mobile DTV, a service that will let viewers tune into the best TV now has to offer on tablets, smart phones, netbooks and other portable devices when they are roaming around outside the house.

If all goes according to plan, the service will comprise many channels, simulcasts of regular local broadcasts for free along with cable networks and VOD for pay.

To provide the service, broadcasters have coalesced into two consortia. Just before the CES opened, one of the consortia, the Mobile Content Venture, led by NBC and Fox, said it had awarded contracts for the conditional access and user interfaces, keeping it on pace to inaugurate a service by the end of this year. The other consortium, the Mobile500 Alliance, said at the show that its station-members could now deliver mobile DTV to 92% of the population.

The broadcasters are going to launch the new service while maintaining their regular HD over-the-air service, which insures that every TV set in every home can enjoy the best of TV and has access to local news and weather.

It all sounds rather innovative to me. But Shapiro doesn’t see (or chooses not to).

In the book, Shapiro argues for taking away half of the broadcasters’ spectrum by 2015 so that it can be sold at auction to the likes of AT&T and Verizon and put to use in wireless broadband applications. Such a move would starve mobile DTV of spectrum and kill it. But that’s OK by Shapiro.

“We cannot let an old business model hog government property any more than we would have granted horse-and-buggy makers exclusive use of the public roads after the invention of the car,” he says.

Shapiro calls broadcasting an “incredibly inefficient” use of valuable spectrum, noting that its over-the-air audience has shrunk to less than 10% of TV homes.

I believe that Shapiro is lowballing the percentage of OTA homes. It’s higher than that and I believe it’s growing as more consumers recognize what a bargain OTA is and cut the cord of cable and satellite.

But what gets me is that Shapiro is ignoring broadcasters’ mobile DTV initiative, which, by any definition, is innovative and, given the quality of the programming, more important than many of wireless gimcracks and geegaws shown at CES.

Well, I guess if a fact doesn’t support your argument, the thing to do is leave it out and hope nobody notices. Such a lapse makes me wonder what else he is leaving out of his book when he makes his case for reforms in free trade, education and immigration.

Shapiro sounded the same theme during his opening speech at the CES last Thursday morning. Broadcasters “are squatting now on our broadband future,” he said. Perhaps Shapiro believes that broadcasters are engaged in a giant sham, pretending that they will put their excess digital spectrum to work in mobile so they can warehouse it for some bigger payday somewhere down the road.

If he does, he should say so, although labeling broadcasters as liars is no better than disparaging them as hogs and squatters.

In the book, Shapiro laments the “coercive hand of government” that skews free markets. Yet, in his calls for broadcast spectrum reallocation, Shapiro is aligning himself with the FCC in its attempt to direct private business.

As you should know, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has made shifting a big block of spectrum from broadcast to broadband a centerpiece of his agenda. In fact, he gave a speech at CES in which he once again made the case for it.

Shapiro, who portrays himself as a free marketeer, sees no irony or inconsistency in his hooking up with a bunch of federal officials and deciding which industry or service is more worthy of precious spectrum.

Look, if broadcasters were doing nothing with their spare digital spectrum, I’d agree they should give it up. They should accept Genachowski’s offer, let the FCC sell it to wireless operators and take what they can get.

But that’s clearly not the case. They are investing ample money and energy into adding an innovative and potentially revolutionary dimension to broadcasting.

And they deserve this shot. They’ve earned it from having invented television and having provided 60 years of magnificent service. Not incidentally, they’ve sold a few TV sets for the consumer electronics industry in that time.

Mobile DTV could lead a broadcast TV renaissance. Next January, I fully expect that if I need to make a run to the supermarket during the football playoffs, I will be able to take the game with me.

Like it or not, Gary, broadcasting going up.

Harry A. Jessell is editor of TVNewsCheck. He can be contacted at 973-701-1067 and hajessell@newscheckmedia.com. You can read his other columns here.

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“They are squatting now on our broadband future,” Shapiro said before thousands in Las Vegas Hilton.

Following the speech, Smith said Shapiro is not giving broadcasting its due credit. “He simply sees a world of wireless broadband, and that’s just not what the future holds.”

According to Smith, the future includes broadcasting’s mobile DTV as a free, one-to-many complement to the wireless broadband.

“He [Shapiro] apparently was writing a book and missed the cord-cutting phenomenon,” he said, tweaking Shapiro for the relentless promotion of his just published The Comeback at the convention. The book, which argues for government policies that promote technological innovation, also attacks broadcasters for not handing over their spectrum for wireless broadband.

“Video on demand is wonderful,” Smith said. “We all enjoy that. We also like video live. But I want to watch the Super Bowl when it’s happening. There are many things that I want locally and free … that broadcasting still provides. “

Smith refused to consider the notion that broadcasters would somehow fail to deliver on their promise of delivering mobile DTV service this year. “You’re going to see a tremendous amount of rollout and we are excited to be a part of that. We are filling the spectrum that we were given. “

Smith suggested that the government and the wireless broadband proponents look elsewhere for spectrum. “Nobody has given back spectrum like we have, nearly a third in the digital transition. We already gave at the office.”

According to Smith, broadcasters’ problem is that Congress continues to see the recovery and auctioning of spectrum as a bank. “Spectrum was the pay-for of every member of Congress’s new spending idea. I suspect that it will be again.”

That will keep the pressure on broadcasters’ spectrum, most of which is ideal for wireless broadband use. The FCC has proposed that broadcasters who voluntarily return some or all of their spectrum to the government be given a share of the auction proceeds.

Smith said he has no objections to such so-called incentive auctions, but he cautioned broadcasters who are tempted to go for the deal: “Make sure the check clears, because between you and the money is something called the United States Congress.”

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