Favorite 2009 Wrap-Ups

No doubt we’ll see a flood of year-end and decade-end stories through the rest of this week, but already I have three wrap-up stories that top my list. Covering TV and technology, here are excerpts from three articles by Todd Spangler of Multichannel News, John Merli writing for TV Technology, and Robert Bianco of USA Today.

Top Cable Tech Trends of 2009, Todd Spangler

Out with the analog: Cable operators this year advanced their digital agendas to make room for more DOCSIS 3.0 and HD.

MSOs also pushed ahead on the wireless front, and it was the year interactive TV (finally) began to bloom for cable, even though Canoe’s initial crack at advanced advertising was a bust. Looking to the future, operators pondered the potential of IPTV, and at the tail end of 2009 we saw the first glimpses TV Everywhere–cable’s bid to extend the video-subscription model to the Internet.

A Landmark Year for Broadcast, John Merli

…David Donovan, president of the Association for Maximum Service Television, calls June 12, 2009 “the most significant date in the history of over-the-air television.” And the president of the Advanced Television Systems Committee, Mark Richer, said “now the real fun starts. No one should underestimate the power of a wireless one-to-many application distribution system. That system is ‘broadcasting…’”

The Decade in Television: Cable, the  Internet Become Players, Robert Bianc0

For TV, it was a decade of Lost and found.

At the broadcast networks, which saw their overall numbers drop by around 8 million viewers, it was 10 years of ratings decline. Yet if those viewers were lost to broadcast, they were found by cable — and what those viewers found was an ever-expanding range of choice.

But don’t cry for broadcast yet. They may be smaller fish, but they’re still by far the biggest in the electronic pond.