26 January 2004

I remember this guy during my stay in the US as a kid... Captain Kangaroo championed TV for kids By Joanne Ostrow Denver Post TV/Radio Critic The Captain was 76 when he died Friday morning. To children of the 1950s, he seemed that old when he started the longest-running kids' series on network television. Millions of baby boomers knew Bob Keeshan as Captain Kangaroo, beloved for his walrus mustache, Dutch boy bangs and big red coat with giant kangaroo-like pockets. Many of us didn't know the coat was red until years later, with the spread of color TV. Keeshan, who died in Vermont after a long illness, made his debut on "Captain Kangaroo" on CBS in 1955. Though grandfatherly in appearance and manner, the producer-performer was only 27 at the time. "I was impressed with the potential positive relationship between grandparents and grandchildren, so I chose an elderly character," Keeshan said, according to The Associated Press. In a statement issued Friday by his son, Michael, Keeshan's family said: "Our father, grandfather and friend was as passionate for his family as he was for America's children. He was largely a private man living an often public life as an advocate for all that our nation's children deserve." "Captain Kangaroo" was an early-morning fixture on CBS until 1985 when it was canceled to make way for an expanded news show. 10:51:42 PM    comment [] Study: Sales of Multi-function Handsets to Soar Make a note of this and lets see where it all is in a year's time.   from  Mobile Pipeline News Sales of wireless devices with multiple capabilities will account for about 43 percent of all handset sales by 2008, according to a study released Monday Jan 26 2004 by Zelos Group. "The mass adoption of full-featured handsets will be disruptive," Seamus McAteer, senior analyst and managing partnerof Zelos Group and the report's author said in a statement. "Consumers will substitute use of PDAs, digital cameras, gaming consoles and music players." The trend will be led by handset vendors like Nokia, but vendors of other types of portable devices will respond in kind, McAteer claimed. "As handsets with multiple gigabytes of storage are launched in the next two or three years, it is possible to envision, for example, Hewlett-Packard launching an iPod with integrated W-CDMA transceiver and dual-use headset and speaker," McAteer said. The report predicts that more these so-called full-featured handsets will ship in 2006 than personal computers. The Symbian OS will be the dominant platform for these devices in the short-term, the study predicts. "But in the long term, the fight for supremacy is far from over," McAteer said. In fact, McAteer predicted that Linux's long-term prospects for these devices are strong because it is inexpensive and developers like open source. Symbian is owned by a consortium of handset vendors including Nokia and Sony Ericsson. However, Palm and Microsoft also are working to gain a foothold in that market. "Symbian beats Microsoft due to the flexibility of its licensing terms," McAteer said. "Microsoft's prospects will be stymied to an extent by its desire to strictly manage how its brand is used. Although we expect at least five million Windows mobile devices to ship in 2004, we find it doubtful that Microsoft will succeed in its stated goal of shipping over 100 million mobile devices running Windows in 2007." 10:29:33 PM    comment [] All India Radio looks nearer to getting rid of external broadcasting. Problem is that AIR has never given the journalists the freedom to make interesting programmes - it is records and talks, very little in the way of interaction. And, AIR was notorious for NEVER replying to letters - even simply requests for a programme schedule! From: http://www.newindpress.com/Newsitems.asp?ID=IEH20040124112801&;Title=Top+Stories&Topic=0 NEW DELHI: The news in Baluchi. The weather report in Swahili. A discussion on pregnancy in Russian. All this and more, through the day, every day _ on  All India Radio's External Services. It's perhaps the last outpost of the Raj: a full division dedicated to radio transmission in 16 non-Indian languages at an annual cost of 10 million Euro. Now, though, Prasar Bharati, realising that there may not be anyone out there actually listening to the programmes _ is planning to pull the plug on its External Services Division. Admitting that the services have become dated in a post-television world, CEO Prasar Bharati Corporation K S Sarma said, ``I have written to the Foreign Secretary and I&B Secretary saying the returns from this are not commensurate with the investments made. I have asked for a thorough review of the services, news content, everything.'' ``The division was set up when there was no television. Today, it takes effort to tune in to short wave. We have to overhaul the entire system first'', he says. The ESD's saviour could be the MEA, whom Sarma believes should pick up the tab. The first broadcast was on October 1, 1939; the British used it for wartime propaganda in languages their allies/soldiers understood well, including Pashto, Burmese, Chinese, Dari. Other languages were added on over the years including Burmese, Thai and Bahasa, the language of Indonesia but none was removed from the service. Today, the broadcasts continue in the same languages, eating up Rs 50 crore annually on maintainance of transmitters and Rs 7 crore on software. The  broadcasts are aired through 19 transmitters in the country _ which, officials say, have outlived their purpose and stretched their budgets. The 16 units (each language is treated as a unit) employ a supervisor, writer and anchors/newsreaders, depending on the duration of broadcasts. Half the staff are students of language from the universities as officials concede it is difficult to find the right people for all the languages beamed by the external services. An old ESD hand says it isn't a revenue-generating service. The only measure of its success, he says, used to be the letters received from the world over. ``There was a time when we received 300 letters a month, now we get one or maybe nothing for months'', he says. One anchor believes the content should be reviewed, pointing towards Pakistan, which has invested considerable money in bolstering its external  services. ``I am aware that the news I read is dated but policy-makers should determine the content suitable for the times'', he says. Obviously, the foreign language does lend itself to absurd situations. Officials speak of how a Persian anchor/translator insisted on airing for an entire year news on problems associated with the gall bladder, as he suffered from a similar complaint. The anchor was, in effect, giving free publicity to his doctor before he was discovered. 2:08:24 PM    comment [] Dutch on-line magazine Emerce (www.emerce.nl) is reporting that NOKIA is showing a new phone at the annual music industry congress in Cannes. Called the Nokia 7700, it will appear in the second half of 2004. What is curious is that this phone is capabale of downloading and displaying video streams sent over DVB terrestrial transmitters - but using the DVB-H (handheld) standard, not DVB-T. Test transmissions in the Helsinki area are due with YLE, MTV3 and Nelonen The demo in France shows that when the number of a Finnish band is called, the latest clip from the band appears, together with the chart position and title/performer info. NOKIA is realising that broadcast media is the best suited to mass communications, rather than the "victim of your own success" capacity problems with GPRS/UMTS systems. I wonder if DAB operators will try similar experiments soon. Otherwise there is a danger that the higher capacity systems associated with DVB-T could make the bridge first, making DAB radio data systems less attractive to the mobile operators. DVB-H is going to be hard for the telecom operators to sell to the politicians. 1:41:42 PM    comment [] DIVERSITY ON THE AIRWAVES: Australian community radio. A new series produced by 2SER-FM explores the history of community radio down-under. The series - which can be found at www.cbonline.org.au , in the sector History,  consists of 13 radio programs and articles. 10:45:44 AM    comment []

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