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Articles by Dick Hobbs - new

State of the Nation and Virtual Social Distancing


Under normal circumstances, I usually make my plans for NAB in November time. It’s when the airlines tend to have sales. This year, for personal reasons, I did not get around to booking back then, and it was only at the end of February that I could start thinking about it. Well, the airline sales had long gone, and I was faced with the prospect of...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs - new
Published 26 March 2020

State of the Nation - The chances of anything coming from...


Among the autumn dramas the old-fashioned broadcasters have offered us this year was a new adaptation of the HG Wells classic The War of the Worlds. Writer Peter Harness stayed pretty faithful to the book, retaining its setting of leafy Surrey and focusing on the human stories. But any mention of The War of the Worlds inevitably brings up the CBS R...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs - new
Published 27 January 2020

State Of The Nation: Securing The Future


This magazine is a notable champion for education in our industry, and deserves much praise for its efforts. To my mind, there is all too little concern for our future. I have previously taken up your time in these pages on the subject of creating the next generation of talent, but I am largely unrepentant that I am going to do it again. Pretty muc...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs - new
Published 03 November 2019

State of the Nation - Getting Connected


We are all familiar with statistics about the growth of the internet. Cisco’s latest report, for instance, says that global IP traffic is increasing at 26% a year, and will reach 4.8 zetabytes a year by 2022. The number of connected devices will be three times the world’s population by the same date. There is a nice chart in the Cisco report: in 19...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs - new
Published 10 September 2019

State of the Nation: Wings, Fine Coffee and Fake Nudes


One of the many attractions of this time of year is that I get to meet with my fellow judges for the IBC Innovation Awards, and see what the industry sees as the most important, most forward-looking projects of the day. For me, this says what the key talking points are going to be in September, far more eloquently than the endless press releases fr...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs - new
Published 16 July 2019

State of the Nation - If Winter Comes


Here’s an important fact that might get lost in all the noise of the moment. HBO’s Game of Thrones, which is relentlessly covered in the press as well as being talked about by its fans, is not actually terribly popular. The opener of the current (and last, thank goodness) series attracted a consolidated audience of about 3.5 million – that includes...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs - new
Published 04 June 2019

State of the Nation - Drama


If you can remember as far back as the 1980s, then you probably remember a Saturday night drama called Hill Street Blues, written and developed by Steven Bochco. Made for NBC in the States, it was widely shown around the world, including in the UK. It was a pioneer ensemble drama, with no star characters but a lot of individuals – the police office...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs - new
Published 21 March 2019

State of the Nation - January 2019


I’m writing these thoughts on the morning of 20 December. From my desk in Tunbridge Wells I am normally gently aware of air traffic at five thousand feet, lining up to land at Gatwick Airport. Today it is silent: since 9.00 last night some idiot has been flying drones across the runway. An airport is a finely tuned machine, with all the interconnec...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs - new
Published 24 January 2019

State of the Nation - November 2018


There is an interesting seminar called Size Matters at the KitPlus Show – organised by the publishers of this fine magazine – at MediaCityUK in Salford on 6 November. It’s a talk by cinematographer Alistair Chapman on the way that camera technology is changing, and in particular the size of the electronic device which creates the image is growing....

Submitted by Dick Hobbs - new
Published 09 November 2018

The Pace of Change


The youngest human to stand on the moon (so far) was Charles Moss, the lunar module pilot of Apollo 16. Charlie had a wonderful claim: his father witnessed the Wright Brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk, and lived to see his son on the moon. Does anything capture the speed of technological advance better than that? The whole of the history of powe...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs - new
Published 08 September 2018

State of the Nation


I am writing this in the middle of a record-breaking heatwave in southern England. Yet it is time to be thinking about the mists and mellow fruitfulness of autumn, or at least the predictably damp and chilly Amsterdam when IBC hits town. What will be the hot talking points of IBC this year? I am not in a position to talk about what the big vendors...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs - new
Published 18 July 2018

Artificial Intelligence and Economics


It’s May, so it seems inevitable that this month’s column should be a bit of a reflection on NAB. And it will, in due course. But first, some news which I think is interesting. Cisco, the IT giant, is selling off its video software solutions business. It is being bought by an as-yet unnamed new company, backed by venture capitalist Permira Funds. T...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs - new
Published 07 June 2018

State of the Nation


I sometimes think I pay too much to get my hair cut. On the most recent occasion I was trimmed, my hairdresser had just returned from a holiday in Hawaii. Where she thought she was going to die. She thought this because the state’s emergency alert system was triggered, sending messages across all available platforms, for 38 minutes, that a ballisti...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs - new
Published 26 March 2018

State of the Nation


This morning I was eating my healthy muesli and idly listening to Radio 4 when someone came on who claimed to be from the Oxford University Computational Propaganda Project. Now regular readers will know that I am fond of a bit of good old-fashioned obfuscation. But talking about computational propaganda when what you mean is fake news on social me...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs - new
Published 12 February 2018

State of the Nation - Telling Imaginary Stories


In mid-October, Nokia issued a press release from its headquarters in Finland, announcing a refocusing of its business, with a growing emphasis on digital health. Read on a few paragraphs, though, and you find this statement: In digital media, the slower-than-expected development of the VR market means that Nokia Technologies plans to reduce invest...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs - new
Published 02 November 2017