Because the official date for the digital transition has been pushed to June, not all the local broadcasters in Phoenix are fully digital. The affiliates are all set, two even have side channels (not sure of the official terminology) that have 24-hour weather. The local PBS station (part of Arizona State University) has four channels at 8.1, 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4. Some of the local religious and Spanish-language broadcasters have two or three side channels.

Part of the goal of the digital transition is to free up analog space for new communications services as well as allow broadcasters to do innovate things over these digital “side channels.” To be competitive in the new TV 2.0 world, one has to hope that innovation means more than just 24-hour weather channels.

The next step for my TV 2.0 project is to get an IP-based box to watch web-based programs on my TV. The Xbox has some content, but it’s a walled garden in that I have to watch what Microsoft has selected as opposed to giving me free reign to scan the web for video content. The same goes for Apple TV and now that I totally messed up my Boxee interface, I am back to square one. I saw a new box from Neulion at CES that could do this, and I am in the process of installing my ZeeVee box (although not on this TV) for get some web goodies. Stay tuned.

I give a thumbs up to the larger viewfinder, better zoom, ability to take SD cards (which is great as HD clips take up lots of space) and ArcSoft editing/distribution software which facilitate one click upload to YouTube. Yes, the Flip camera also offers one clip uploading, but the ArcSoft program allows you to enter clip title, description, category and tags in its programming while the Flip in-camera software does not enable those features. A thumbs down to the fact the Kodak camera has virtually no on-board storage, meaning you need an SD card to get started (I recommend a 4GB card at minimum) while the Flip Mino HD has 4GB of memory built into the camera.

Size is where the rubber meets the road. My Flip Mino HD fits into my pocket and is 3.94 inches high, 1.97 inches wide and .63 inches deep. The Kodak Zi6 is 4.5 inches high, 2.5 inches wide and .9 inches deep. The Kodak is one-half ounce heavier than the Flip Mino HD. For me, what it boils down to is that the Flip Mino is great for more “clandestine” video scenarios while the Kodak is a hair too large to fit comfortably in one’s pocket.

Comparing prices on Amazon.com, the Kodak is $152.60 ($2.34 cents less if you want one in pink) while the Flip Mino is $201.61. Below is a clip I shot using the Kodak Zi6. To see the HD quality, click on the “watch in HD” tab at the bottom right of the player window.

Here’s a short video preview on what we may (or many not) see on the show floor.

CES 2009: HD Camcorders on ParadeA look ahead at what we are likely to see @ CES 2009 in the realm of consumer camcorders

According to Lycos’s tally of top searches for 2008 (I guess it’s over before it’s over), nothing related to jobs, Iraq, McCain, Obama, financial bailouts or gas prices made the top 10 searches for the year. The top searches are: Poker, Paris Hilton, YouTube, golf, Sarah Palin, Brittney Spears, Clay Aiken, Pamela Anderson, Facebook and Holly Madison. And since I had no idea who Holly Madison was (not related to Dolly Madison), I searched and found out she’s in that reality TV show with Hef and his “granddaughters.” (Couldn’t resist that one).

For the record: man of the year based on Lycos searches? Clay Aiken, not Barack Obama. And if you are wondering why NBC is thinking about cutting back on prime time programming? Consider that the top TV programs based on searches were “Star Trek Enterprise” (is that still even on?) and “Dancing with the Stars.” Now that’s entertainment.

What will the top searches for ’09 be? Hard to predict, but unless you’re playing with plastic chips, I am betting poker won’t be one of them.

If you think about 700,000 concurrent users, that equates to the number of TV households in the number 44 market in the U.S., that being Albuquerque. That is households that have a television set, not actual viewers at any one given time. That number (called HUT, households using television) is always far less unless you’re talking about the Super Bowl or other mega event.

As far as content goes, this former TV critic thinks the show was pretty bad. User Generated Content as an art form does not translatewell into live television; for that matter, it doesn’t translate into much of anything. Nonetheless, the deployment of web TV technology was impressive. Google and its partners delivered a good-looking on-screen picture with very few frame freezes, even at full screen. There were three cameras, one on stage and two backstage and you could easily click from one to the other with only a slight delay. There was a comment board, but you needed to refresh to see the latest remarks. And, of course, there were ads/sponsors, including Virgin Airlines and Pure Digital (makers of the Flip camera). I didn’t like the fact that when you clicked on an ad, you were taken out of the live experience to another website. That will need to be improved in future live programs.

And that begs the question, what’s next for YouTube as a live web broadcaster. Anyone who thought that live was taking a back seat to on-demand streaming, overlooking the success of such efforts as Operation MySpace, and election night coverage from the BBC, CNN and Associated Press, should now be a true believer. 2009 will go down as the year that not only broadcasting transitioned from analog to digital, but also the year that web TV went live. Being able to provide robust live services could be what begins to thin out the ranks of Online Video Publishing Platform Providers.

As for Google/YouTube, one wonders if this was just an experiment/warning shot with Google flexing its muscles and saying “here’s what we can do if we decided to go into this business.” What we don’t know, and it’s doubtful Goo-tube will reveal this information, is what it cost to run this live event and whether it made any profit. Webcasters, broadcasters and consumers await what’s next with a mix of excitement and fear.

I am in possession of five video cameras and one mobile phone with great video capability. Each camera seems to fit a purpose, and those from Pure Digital have become my go-to devices when I am trying to be inconspicuous (like videoing surreptitiously in Graceland) yet grab a clip with good picture and sound. My original, about three or four years old, is a rather innocuous looking white device with simple features, and is a big banged up from being dropped a zillion times (and keeps on tickin’) and from having shot about 400 videos in places ranging from the Underground in London to the waterfront in Cannes. One of my most viewed videos on YouTube shows off the beauty of this little wonder—I grabbed a quick interview with one of the Tampa Bay Rays (nee Devil Rays), Fernando Perez, as he emerged from the locker after the Arizona Fall league Championship in 2006. The camera fires up quickly and is made for those spontaneous moments you want to capture on video.

Last week, the nice folks at Pure Digital sent me its latest camera, the minoHD. It’s smaller and lighter than the original mostly because it uses a rechargeable lithium battery as opposed to two AA batteries in the original. To compare the old and the new, I took the cameras to a Fall League baseball game and shot essentially the same scene with both cameras. Below are the results.

Original Pure Digital

MinoHD

What I like about the new camera: Battery life indicator; more brightly lit viewfinder; on-off switch on the side to avoid an accidental shutoff while filming; better in-viewer previewing; tripod mount; better software to create video clips and seamlessly upload them to YouTube, AOL (oops, AOL’s shutting that down next week) and Myspace.

What I miss from the older model: More intuitive zoom.

The HD capability in the mino is not the sort of 1080-I HD you will find in your home plasma, but the quality is noticeable when you play the videos on a bright video monitor or burn them on a DVD. Given that YouTube does an iffy job on transcoding, the resulting video you get after uploading to YouTube is no different than from any other camera. If you want to get more out of your HD clips, I suggest uploading to Vimeo or Blip.TV.

And here’s my dream: A Pure Digital camera with a WiFi radio inside to allow me to stream live (ala Qik) or go to a hotspot and upload on the fly. Will I see one of these at CES? I sure hope so.