Each week I like to take a few minutes and share select trade news articles with students in my New England Tech classes. It’s critical in any field to remain current, follow emerging trends, best practices, and the various challenges that face the industry.
Below are three articles from the past week that we breifly discussed during class:
In the field, the GY-HM890 is paired with a Verizon 4G LTE modem that connects directly to the camera via USB. At the station, JVC’s new BR-800 ProHD Broadcaster server manages the HD streams from the cameras and routes them through four Teradek decoders for live reports. Novitsky said each camera’s embedded Zixi advanced error correction, combined with the ProHD Broadcaster, has created such a highly reliable single modem streaming system that WDBJ7 will purchase more decoders and expand its live ENG capabilities next year.
2. dB or not dB? Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Decibels But Were Afraid to Ask
The folks at Rhode and Scwartz have published a white paper that offers an in-depth explanation of “decibels”.  Don’t be afraid of all the math in this PDF download, you will most certainly walk away with a much deeper understand of dB.
3. The ultimate over-the-air DVR and streaming player in one. – Tivo
TiVo may have a number of lucrative partnerships with pay TV operators, but the company isn’t giving up on cord cutters either: On Monday, TiVo announced a new version of its Roamio DVR that squarely targets people without a TV subscription. The new Roamio OTA only works with an antenna, and will start selling for just $50 at select Best Buy stores next month.
We swung by Blue Microphones’ booth at CES to get our hands on its trio of new mics, and while the Mikey Digital and Spark Digital (the former for iPhone and iPad, and the latter for iPad only) looked very much like their analog counterparts, the cute little Tiki was quite the attention-seeker with its cyborg snail-like shape (and did we mention that there’s a push button on its butt for toggling Intelligent Mute?). The new Spark’s shock-mount desktop stand also intrigued us — we’d say it’s a nice blend of the old mount and the Yeti’s stand. Other than that, there’s really not much else to say about these funky-looking mics, so we’ll let our photos below do the rest of the job.