Articles

Articles, opinion and reviews from the industry. It is free to add your own articles, just login / register and follow the links in your KitHub panel.

Articles by Dick Hobbs.

Still looking good

---

by Dick Hobbs Issue 107 - November 2015 The television industry is in crisis, as we all know. Experts everywhere are telling us that consumers want content on demand, wherever they are. Online and mobile platforms will mean the end of the broadcaster and the channel as a brand. But heres the thing. While all these experts are telling us this, consu...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs.

Published 01 December 2015

Stop, collaborate and listen

---

by Peter Savage Issue 106 - October 2015 Fresh from his trip to Amsterdam, Azule chairman Peter Savage relives what he saw at IBC by highlighting a very welcome industry trend: equipment manufacturers are finally talking to each other. Its not terribly rock and roll but the most surprising and welcome - thing that I saw at IBC 2015 was the willing...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs.

Published 01 November 2015

A brief history of time

---

by Dick Hobbs Issue 106 - October 2015 And another IBC is written into the annals of history. Another week in Amsterdam, sharing knowledge and experience. Say what you like about IBC: it is a great chance to meet, talk and learn. Now at IBC I actually perform a number of tasks behind the scenes which keep me largely occupied and out of trouble. And...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs.

Published 01 November 2015

Hold up the weather

---

by Dick Hobbs Issue 105 - September 2015 Its no go my honey love, its no go my poppet. Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit. The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall for ever,But if you break the bloody glass, you wont hold up the weather. It is not often I inflict poetry upon you, so why have I turned to Lo...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs.

Published 01 October 2015

Chasing ratings

---

by Dick Hobbs Issue 104 - August 2015 As everyone is no doubt aware, the BBCs core structures are being investigated at the moment as part of the renewal of its charter. The political bodies set up to do this are made up largely of anti-BBC people, so we are in for interesting times. I have a view on the BBC and its funding, and maybe one day in on...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs.

Published 01 September 2015

Back to the future

---

by Dick Hobbs Issue 103 - July 2015 I was recently talking to the estimable James Gilbert, who runs the equally estimable graphics and automation specialist Pixel Power. He said something that made me think. We were talking about scalability, and he said that it works in two directions. There is the sort of scalability that we all readily understan...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs.

Published 01 August 2015

Those pesky scientists

---

by Dick Hobbs Issue 102 - June 2015 This month\'s picture is of something I was given on a visit to the Grass Valley camera factory in Breda, maybe 10 years ago. I think it is a thing of beauty, which is why it sits in pride of place on top of the wine cabinet. It is the sharp end an HD system camera: the optical block and a CCD imager. We saw in t...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs.

Published 01 July 2015

A box of delights

---

by Dick Hobbs Issue 101 - May 2015 In the immediate aftermath of NAB and its bombardment by new gizmos, I want to talk about Professor Noriaki Kano. In the 1980s, at the Tokyo University of Science, he came up with a simple model of product design for customer satisfaction. His original work was more complicated than this diagram, but fundamentally...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs.

Published 01 June 2015

What a difference a decade makes

---

by Dick Hobbs Issue 100 - April 2015 If you have got to the back of this magazine, you cannot fail to have noticed that it is issue number 100. I asked Simon Tillyer and Matt Robbins, the dynamic duo behind the publication, how it all started. "The website was initially just a project,\" Simon said, "and when Matt arrived in the summer of 2005 we c...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs.

Published 01 May 2015

Tune in and turn on

---

by Dick Hobbs Issue 99 - March 2015 It was World Radio Day last month. Friday the thirteenth, to be precise, but I do not think the date was chosen with disaster in mind. In fact the date was set to celebrate the anniversary of the launch of United Nations Radio, on 13 February 1946. Unesco created World Radio Day much more recently: the first was...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs.

Published 01 April 2015

Freelance Success - Make the most of your talent

---

by Peter Savage Issue 98 - February 2015 I was reading the back page of The Sunday Times this morning an article by Luke Johnson of Pizza Express fame (though that description doesnt do justice to this serial entrepreneur and business investor). Todays article was about how to get rich quick. Interesting, I thought, as it made me think of all the p...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs.

Published 01 March 2015

Bring up the bodies

---

by Dick Hobbs Issue 98 - February 2015 If you have even once turned on BBC television in the last couple of months, you could not fail to learn that the big blockbuster drama this winter is Wolf Hall, a television adaptation of Hilary Mantel\'s two-thirds complete trilogy about the Tudors, and Thomas Cromwell in particular. I subscribe to what seem...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs.

Published 01 March 2015

Time out

---

by Dick Hobbs Issue 97 - January 2015 Charles Holland Duell, United States Commissioner of Patents from 1898 to 1901, is supposed to have said "Everything that can be invented has been invented". It is pretty certain that this is a completely apocryphal story, of course, but it sticks in the memory. In fact, we have a verified quotation from him wh...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs.

Published 01 February 2015

BAH! Humbug

---

by Dick Hobbs Issue 96 - December 2014 Yes, it's that time of year again. When, if you are a commercial broadcaster, you start coining it in with the Christmas commercials. Presumably if you are a director or a post house, you are already pitching for next year's blockbusters. They never have the look of something that has been knocked up on the sp...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs.

Published 01 January 2015

The Pitfalls of buying second hand kit

---

by Peter Savage Issue 95 - November 2014 Last week a client, on the lookout for some second-hand kit, asked me about the basic ground rules when buying equipment. How could he be assured that everything was sound, and in an orderly fashion, and that he would be able to gain good title on the equipment? There are two ways to buy equipment: through a...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs.

Published 01 December 2014