Columns by Leslie Ellis

By now you’re either wearing something that monitors your activities, or you’ve witnessed such gadgetry on someone’s wrist, shoelace, or belt. We’re now about five years into the rise of wearable technologies.

By the numbers (fresh from the NPD Group), Fitbit owns a 68% share of market, with Jawbone at 19% and Nike at 10%. Last year, consumers spent $330 million on smartphone-enabled activity trackers. That’s expected to double again this year.

Which means it’s time to take a brief walk through the jargon jumble describing what’s inside the gadgetry of trackers — because it’s thick.

Take the “Kiwi Move,” for instance. Introduced at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, it’s a piece of plastic, about the size of a book of matches. Inside it:  A gyroscope, magnetometer, barometer, accelerometer, thermometer, and microphone.

The microphone is easy enough to fathom. In the Kiwi demo, a woman says aloud the type and amount of ingredients she’s putting into a blender: One apple. One Kiwi (of course.) An avocado. And so on. The microphone hears the data, and calculates the nutritional value of the smoothie.

Likewise for the thermometer, which can work in tandem with the on-board barometer to predict the weather. Barometers, which became mainstream in the mid-1600s, measure atmospheric pressure. (Happily, the barometers found in digital devices don’t use mercury, which is still poisonous.)

The magnetometer came to life in the early 1800s as a way to find things, using magnetic fields: Submarines, coal, auroras, minerals. In digital gadgetry, magnetometers use a three-axis orientation (vertical, lateral, longitudinal) to detect motion. A compass app is a good example.

Accelerometers are the reason we can turn our gadgets sideways for different orientations (landscape v portrait) of images. And, acceleration being acceleration, they power the pedometer part of wearable technologies.

A companion acronym to all of this is “MEMS,” which stands for Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems.” It categorizes the work of very small things — 20 micrometers to a millimeter in size. (Last week, news from the MEMS world revealed that most smartphones now contain more than 12 MEMS chips, which will go to 20 “soon.” The report went on to stress the importance of the adhesives used to package the chips — with impressively nerdy names like “glob tops,” “cap bonding,” and “ASIC die attach.”)

Last but not least: The gyroscope, which also falls into the MEMS category. It measures orientation, based on the principles of angular momentum. In essence, it’s a self-spinning top, just like the toy. In the mid-1700s, gyroscopes were put to use as levels, to locate the horizon in foggy conditions. Nintendo’s Wii, and all of the devices powered by companies like Hillcrest Technologies, put gyroscopes to work as high-end pointing devices.

That’s a quick walk through the thick jargon of what’s inside the stuff on our wrists and waistbands, to inform us about how active we are, or aren’t.

This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichannel News.

ESPN’s Jodi Markley: Born for Sports & TV

By Leslie Ellis

When Jodi Markley was growing up, in Miami, her older sister Barbara made this prescient observation: “All you do is play sports and watch sports on TV.”

At the time, television was a three-channel universe. And when she wasn’t playing sports, Markley parked herself in front of anything involving the Miami Dolphins or gymnastics, and was a devotee of ABC’s Wide World of Sports with Jim McKay.

These days, Markley is Senior VP of Operations for ESPN — the largest single department in the company — and is responsible for everything that needs to happen, logistically and otherwise, to put the network’s 3,000+ live remote events and thousands of hours of studio programming on the air.

“Jodi is the complete leader,” said Kevin Martinez, VP of Corporate Outreach for the network. “She walks the walk, learns constantly, and demonstrates that you are defined by what you’ve learned.”

It’s a job that requires grace under pressure, all the time. Like when a mobile truck caught fire on the way to an event, or when games run way long. “Nothing ends on time. Nothing happens when it’s supposed to happen. That’s what makes it so exciting!,” the 2014 Multichannel News Wonder Woman said.

Markley’s route to ESPN involves a very small suitcase, a “short” trip to Connecticut, a horrible movie, and plain old serendipity. It goes like this: After graduating from the University of South Florida with a communications degree, relatives hooked her up to work on the crew of a movie being shot in the nutmeg state.

“It was the worst film ever made — it’s not on IMDB,” Markley laughs. While there, she picked up a side job as an associate director with the ESPN mobile unit covering events at the Hartford Civic Center, and a weekend gig working in house, at ESPN’s studios.

From there, she worked her way up, and up, and up to SVP, Production and Operations for ESPN International– ultimately launching ESPN 35 times, around the world, as well as 13 versions of SportsCenter in different languages.

“I’ve worked with Jodi for over 20 years, on everything from network launches, show launches, and overall event management. She’s always the person who ensures that we’re extremely organized, and covering each and every detail,” notes Chris Calcinari, VP of ESPN & ABC Sports Remote Operations.

Six years ago, she felt the need for a change, and heard about an open spot in operations. She found out who would make the decision, walked to his office, learned that he was in the restroom — and waited. “When he came out, I said, ‘can I walk you to your office? I want to talk to you.’” During the short walk, she asked for the job, and ultimately got it.

Markley attributes her pluck to a family full of strong women, and a career full of strong mentors. Her mom and dad ran a para medical company in Florida; she’s one of four over-achieving daughters – one sister is a lawyer, one a pediatric surgeon and one a veterinarian.

(Little known Markley family fact: While on honeymoon in New York, Markley’s father won the showcase prize on The Price Is Right. The haul: $1,000, diapers for a year, a case of Dove soap, and a movie camera.)

Colleagues say Markley is a wonder woman because of her steadfast commitment to the people of ESPN. Several described scenarios in which they became ill, and Markley went out of her way to help — helping a colleague with a long-term illness every day; driving another to the pharmacy and pushing her way to the front of the line to get an inhaler during an asthma attack.

“One question I hear her ask her employees, colleagues and friends is, ‘what can I do?,’” said good friend and colleague Meg Green, Senior Director of Talent Negotiation and Recruitment for ESPN.

For Markley, it really is all about the people. “Any well-oiled machine starts with happy people,” she says.

Steve Anderson, Executive VP of News & Content Operations for ESPN, said that when Markley became head of the networks remote, studio operations and studio directing, “she immediately focused on the people — she created a strong, diverse management team that improved communication and transparency.”

Plus, she’s a life saver — literally. Once, while attending a dinner event at a National Association of Broadcasters show, a woman sitting near her began to choke. “I looked around. Nobody was doing anything. So I Heimliched her,” Markley nonchalantly recalls, adding: “She and I still get together from time to time — but she’s not allowed to eat any meat near me.”

At home, she’s a “die-hard gardener,” and yoga practitioner. After a hard day’s work, she’ll “bust into a down dog” to chill out. She’s very close to her family, near and far — siblings still in Florida, plus husband Paul Rochford, and three kids: Samantha, 22, a business major at Southern New Hampshire University; Alison, 20, studying biology at Roger Williams University, and son Jacob, 16, who starts the college search this year.

Her other passion — the Red Cross — emerged after watching her mother battle cancer, 10 years ago. “My mother was my beacon of strength and it was so painful to watch her suffer.  During her treatment, the nurses kept bringing her bags of platelets. I was fascinated, and wondered where they came from,” Markley says, adding: “I realized, I need to help somebody else’s mother,” and became a platelet and plasma donor. She went on to join the board of the Conn. and Rhode Island Red Cross three years ago: “That’s my passion.”

With a new 196,000 square foot digital center set to open in May, including a brand new set, with brand new animations, for Sports Center; the launch of the SEC network; the opening of a newly constructed production facility in Mexico – all coupled with applying multi-platform elements to the thousands of events ESPN produces — it’s going to be a big year for ESPN, and for Markley. And she’ll take it all in stride. “We work in sports. We work in TV. It doesn’t get any better than that.”

This profile originally appeared in Multichannel News.

It’s Super Bowl time, and for network technologists, the big action has little to do with Broncos or Seahawks, and everything to do with how many people will watch it as a video stream over the Internet, vs. a traditional television broadcast.

In network terms, the SuperBowl is to technologists what Mother’s Day is to the people who built and maintain the original telephone network: The day the network gets stress-tested for max usage. Conversationally, network engineers tend to append the word “problem” to it — “the Super Bowl Problem.”

Telephony engineers even came up with a unit of measure for it — the Erlang (for Agner Erlang, the guy who came up with it). The Erlang measures the average number of concurrent phone calls carried by a circuit, over a period of time.

So far as we know, there’s still no official “video erlang,” but the concept is the same. The numbers: In 2012, the Big Game hit the Internet as a live video stream for the first time. A little over a million people (of over 100 million) tuned in.

Last year, about three million people (out of 108 million) watched the game as a live Internet stream.

At issue is what happens when half or more of SuperBowl viewers tune in over the Internet, and/or using Internet Protocol. What happens, for instance, when 50 million people are all watching the same thing, as a live video stream? What happens when they pause, or rewind?

“If it were something you could hear, what you’d hear is a giant flushing sound,” one technologist quipped about it last week.

Refresher: “Multicast” is the Internet-y way of saying “broadcast,” meaning one to many. Right now, when you stream anything over the Internet, you’re watching it “unicast.” A special session is set up between you and the server holding what you want to watch. If your neighbor chooses to watch the same thing, she gets a different unicast stream. One to one.

Were all 108 million football watchers need a unicast stream, of the same thing, all at the same time? This is what people are talking about when they say the Internet would buckle.

So where are we with multicast? Cable technologists say they’re making steady progress, but are divided over models of when things go wrong. Some say the efficiencies enabled by multicast only kick in when 30% or more of viewers are watching the big game over the Internet; others say the operational impacts, and especially ad insertion, are going to be significant.

So here’s my wager: Either the Broncos or the Seahawks will win, and six million people will watch the game as a live Internet stream.

This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichannel News.

LAS VEGAS — At this writing, my feet have logged three days and 15.2 miles of walking the 1.8 million square feet of 2014 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), and there’s still two days of Show to go. Here’s the bigger takeaways so far.

1: This is the year we all were made acutely aware of how dumb our homes are. And everything in them. It is Sensor City at CES this year, with everything from connected toothbrushes (perhaps to go with last year’s connected forks?) to connected washing machines (which will send you a text message if you forget to move a load to the dryer.)

People call this “the Internet of Things,” of course, and “the Internet of Everything.”

A common refrain, during demos: “And after you pair your (name of dumb thing) to your house, you can (make your house / your thing smart.)” Ask the oven what it’s doing. Ask the dishwasher. The garage door. It goes on and on and on.

2: If it doesn’t come with a sensor, it comes with a camera. We saw a small rubber ball outfitted with six tiny cameras (for law enforcement to throw or roll into a room, to get a better look before entering.) Cameras that clip onto the bathing suit, to stream live video directly to Facebook (great.)

3. Health and fitness gadgets, which go under the category of “wearable technology,” took up 25,000 square feet of exhibit space this year, and are further proof that CES is a hypochondriac’s paradise. Alongside the now-saturated wearable pedometer marketplace, there were wristbands that measure the amount of sun your skin is receiving, and gadgets that collect 5,000 data points from your body — every hour.

There was even a fitness collar for your dog, to track its breathing and heart rate and so on. (A companion app ties to veterinarians and health records.)

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention 4K television, which also goes by UltraHD. It was (predictably) everywhere, and sure, it’s gorgeous. It’s also still way ahead of the rest of the television ecosystem, from the cameras that can film in 4K, to the HDMI connector on the set itself — and everything in between.

I’ll stick with a 2013 observation about 4K: If it’s of interest to you, find somewhere else for the bookcase, or whatever else is currently occupying your largest wall.

This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichanel News.

No better way to know what’s super-cool, gadgetry-wise, than to check in with the people who make it a point to know and live such things. Which is what we did. With no further ado, here’s what cable’s top gadget junkies either crave, or love.

Starting with flying things and personal drones. For Mike Hayashi, EVP of Architecture, Development and Engineering for Time Warner Cable, and Comcast CTO Tony Werner, it’s a ($1,100) flying camera — the DJI Phantom 2 Vision. “Watch out for my drone,” Werner cautioned. (He was kidding. Pretty sure.)

With the camera-copter, you too can be a drone — long before Amazon lifts off: http://bit.ly/19jlSsg

“It is going to change the world,” Hayashi added of the gizmo. And we believed him, after viewing the clip he sent: http://bit.ly/1dpLhDi

Hayashi, an audio engineer at his core, also admires the Klipsch La Scala II Three-Way Horn-Loaded Loudspeaker (http://amzn.to/18UOCYl) with 15-inch woofer and 2-inch composite cone. (Of course he does. )

Super hot in 2013-14 gadgetry: Action-cams that clip onto a helmet, surfboard, dog, you name it. GoPro (www.gopro.com) owns the category. (Werner’s list includes the “mutt mount,” for a dog’s eye view.)

Fancy watches are back. Sherita Caesar, VP/National Engineering and Tech Ops for Comcast, likes the Samsung S9100 phone watch (http://bit.ly/JHa6BG). “It’s big and has lots of flashing lights,” she laughed.

Also big: Bicycle accouterment. Jay Rolls, CTO of Charter, is eyeing a road bike with electronic shifting (http://bit.ly/1fIoQf1) — “it’s finally gone mainstream — but commands a $1,000 premium,” he sighed, which makes us think he’ll be shifting gears the old-fashioned way, for now.

For Jud Cary, VP and Deputy General Counsel at CableLabs, it’s a string of LED lights made specifically to spruce up a bicycle’s spokes: http://bit.ly/18BbGk0

And, of course, there’s television sets. Craig Cuttner, SVP/Advanced Technology for HBO, and someone who closely monitors developments on the 4K / UltraHD scene, finally upgraded his “1980s HDTV” with a Samsung F8500 series plasma. “I love the look of the dark blacks of plasma — and, take that, 4K, it’s 1080P. As the future will foretell, it’s all about brightness!”

Likewise for Sabrina Calhoun, VP/Engineering for Brighthouse, who braved a big-box store last week to fall in love with Samsung’s curved OLED. “WOW! It looks like a work of art,” she noted. Price tag: $9,000. (She’ll stick with her non-organic TV for now.)

Lifelong gadget guru Bill Sheppard, with Nuance Communications, recommends the Aviator Laptop Stand, for chronic air travelers. (http://keynamics.com/laptop-stand.html)“It’s a cheap but really useful way to keep a laptop usable even when the jerk in front of you fully reclines.” (I’m in for that one.)

And as a guy on a mission to empower his two daughters to be excited by technology and programming, Sheppard also likes the Lego Mindstorms EV3 (Lego Mindstorms EV3), which he described as “a third generation robotics program with an amazing array of programmability, sensors, I/O, integration, etc. — the ultimate geek toy and educational to boot!”

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention what’s on the mind of our own Jeff Baumgartner — The Bauminator. As the guy who first described to me how he was flipping his family out by changing channels on the home TV, while he was on the road, he’s now ready for an upgrade to his Slingbox scene. “I’m looking at the Slingbox 500, to complement the Slingbox Pro-HD that I installed at my parent’s house — so I can watch the Broncos games that aren’t covered in Philly.” I’m no football expert, but it would appear this is a good year to do that.

That’s the roundup for this year. From all of us to you — may all of your 2014 gadgets be friendly and bright! Merry merry.

This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichannel News.

It’s now less than 10 days until Christmas. Chances are high that you need extra batteries for some of those packages you’ll put under the tree next Tuesday night — which seems a festive reason to drop in on that vital technology precinct.

Most of us grumbled through this year about this or that battery draining so quickly, or taking so long to charge, or getting so hot when it’s charging. Today’s batteries seem to draw as much in expletives as they do electrical current.

As much as we get mad at our batteries, though, they too are on a massive innovation trajectory. For instance: Sumitomo Electric wants to triple the life of a battery using a complicated process that involves a new-ish conductive material called “Aluminum-Celmet.” It gets painted onto a plastic foam, which gets nickel-plated, then heated, so the foam and other materials separate. The foam is more porous, so more Lithium can go in, or some such.

Then there’s the recharging mat. Plop your phone onto it, watch it refill its tank. Outfits like the Power Matters Alliance, founded by Procter & Gamble and PowerMat Technologies last year, want to line the horizontal surfaces of our lives with such charging pads. Coffee shops, train stations, ironing boards, you name it.

Here’s an end state for batteries that’s simultaneously desirable and inconceivable: Recharing our gadgetry without wires, and without a charging pad. What! The Alliance For Wireless Power, among others, want to do what charging mats do, but over longer distances.

But this is by far my favorite battery story of the year: Eesha Khare, the 18 year old who invented a way to completely recharge a cell phone — in 30 seconds.

She (she!) won Intel’s Young Scientist of the Year award for supercapacitor-based energy storage, detailed in the deliciously nerdy-sounding “Design and Synthesis of Hydrogenated TiO2-Polyaniline Nanorods for Flexible High-Performance Supercapacitors.”

Translation: Foundational stuff for a battery that lasts way longer than today’s Lithium-Ion types — 10,000 cycles, compared to around 1,000 cycles inside the batteries powering the gadgets in our digital gardens now.

Bonus: It’s solid state, which means no nasty battery juice inside. That also means it’s environmentally friendly. And, it can be bent or folded or rolled up, and still maintain its electrical properties.

None of this will be ready by next Wednesday. But have faith. It’s coming.

This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichannel News.

ATLANTA–As expected, the annual get-together of cable’s technical community steamrolled a fresh mound of terminology into the field of view.

This year’s batch, wafting up from the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo two weeks ago, seemed less about tongue-twisting gibberish, and more about lingo swapping  —  particularly as it relates to the Wild West that is “open source” everything.

Here’s an example. “Intellectual Property leakage.” Abbreviated, IP leakage. Important: If life gives you cause to say it, do not say aloud the abbreviated version. Learn from those of us who fell prey to this linguistic trap, too many times – it’s but a variation of “it seems like IP everywhere!”

Intellectual property leakage is another early reason why cable technologists used to avoid dabbling in the open source software common to The Big Internet. Open source stipulates a “votes with code” mindset — participants contribute their efforts into a big, open repository, for anyone else to dip into.

This was seen as particularly risky when it came to set-top boxes, which contain things just too sensitive to be open. Like how encrypted signals are decrypted, for instance. Or how they tie fairly directly into things like billing data.

That all changed with the RDK – the Reference Design Kit. As was confirmed by panelists on an “RDK in Action” panel during Expo, RDK is the cable industry’s first real example of open source inside the set-tops and gateways cable operators buy to lease to consumers.

Concerns about being infected by the stuff of The Big Internet, coupled with the worries of Intellectual Property leakage, are why RDK is technically considered “shared source.” The difference between “open source” and “shared source,” very simply? The license. RDK community members gain access to the source code repository by signing a (zero dollar) license.

Then there’s the fork. Forks matter greatly in open source/shared source communities. This is more “fork in the road” than “put a fork in it,” although generally speaking, forks are bad. They happen when an open source effort decides to take a different technological course. Then, everyone who uses that code must decide: Take the fork, or stay on the original course?

This happened in September with one of the core components in the RDK stack – the web engine – which forked to a Google-built effort called “Blink.” Experts at the RDK panel at SCTE marked the development as “no biggie,” explaining that a tenet of RDK is to stay at the tip of the developments in the open source elements it selected. In other words, if Blink is deemed better, then so it shall be.

Bottom line: Cable going open source in its leased electronics is a new way of thinking about how it sources equipment. It’s part of the overall transition of the cable operator as an integrator, to the cable operator as an innovator, to quote Time Warner Cable SVP/technology Matt Zelesko, who added: “This is a key trend. It’s really important.”

Duly noted.

It wasn’t that long ago – two years, maybe three – that the term “open source,” to industries like cable, which operate giant, two-way networks, was dismissed as too risky. Guaranteed to introduce malware and other kinds of security hazards.

It just wasn’t a wise idea, the thinking went, to usher the techniques of The Big Internet into professionally managed networks.

That’s all changed. It changed quickly and pervasively, such that even those of us who make it a habit to track the technologies of this industry find ourselves thinking, “I saw the whole thing. What happened?”

Open source. Open stack. Open flow. Open this, open that. Open is good; proprietary is bad. That’s the trajectory.

Before we start breaking this down: Our apologies to those readers who’ve maneuvered the software jargon jungle long before the rest of us. You know who you are. Hunch: You’re a smaller percentage of the readership of this magazine than the rest of us.

What happened? It’s all part of the unstoppable flow of technologies, networks, services and people toward “all IP,” where the “IP” stands for “Internet Protocol.” As it is, the industry’s broadband networks are becoming “virtualized” – broken apart into individual chunks, or modules, of activity. At the same time, competition from all sides forces the need to do everything faster.

That’s where the open source community comes in. You need a module to get your network to do something? What if that something already exists, in the open source community – why reinvent that wheel?

Also: Open components are generally more transparent, which matters a lot in times of trouble. In today’s (proprietary) world, when something konks out, step one is to call the supplier. Here’s an actual example, from a recent batch of notes:

“With every (supplier) release, you get one large executable file. And if something doesn’t work, you don’t know what it is that doesn’t work. You test it. You go back to the vendor. They take a look at it – they don’t know where the problem is. They send you another large executable file. You go through that cycle four, five times.”

By contrast, with code that’s based on open source techniques, you’re able to see into the code, to fix problems on the fly. That load balancer that’s giving you fits? Move the logic out into an application layer for inspection. Find the bug, fix it, six hours.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the “open” world is thick with activity, participants, “solutions,” and jargon. We’ll tease out the parts that matter, and bring them to you here.

This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichannel News.

Cable’s technical community heads to Atlanta next week for the annual SCTE Cable-Tec Expo, guaranteed to be a maze of impressively nerdy tech talk. Here’s a preview of likely lingo.

Predictive Distortions and CPE Spectrum Analysis: This one’s all about some seriously good stuff happening in field operations, which is the ability to predict plant problems, with location, based on distortion signatures.

This leads directly to “CPE Spectrum Analysis,” where the CPE stands for Customer Premise Equipment. It means operators can reduce the tried-and-true spectrum analyzer (which are spendy) into code inside a set-top, modem or gateway.

Yotta, as in that’s a yotta data: Big data is a theme at Expo, just as everywhere else. “Yotta” is the prefix for biggest unit of measurement there is, for numbers. As a word, it’s a septillion. In the order of things, it goes “kilo, mega, giga, tera, peta, exa, zetta, yotta.”

Yotta comes into play in cable tech when thinking through how to deal with big volumes of data – like when you’re polling, say, 40 million pieces of CPE, every 10 minutes.

The Combining Network. One of the black arts in any cable headend is the combining network. It’s the last thing that happens before everything goes into the laser to shoot out onto fiber, then coax, then homes. It’s critical, because it’s the thing that combines multiple, outbound video channels together for the ride to subscribers.

Often derided as “a rats nest,” the combining network is a hot tech topic because it will change, and maybe even go away, as the transition to IP (Internet Protocol) marches on. That’s good news from a reduction-of-complexity perspective, but it’s a brain-melter to think through.

Bufferbloat Mitigation: In data networks, buffers exist to make sure bits don’t bunch up when pipes get crowded. With so much video moving over the Internet, buffers are already starting to bloat, which causes quality issues.

Rolaids aren’t an option. Nor does the historical remedy work: Throwing more bandwidth at it. Which is why bufferbloat mitigation falls into the “likely lingo” hat at this year’s Expo.

There’s more! So much more! We’ll bring it all back for you….

This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichannel News.

Here’s some good news from the Land of Connectors: We’re not going to have to replace all those spendy HDMI cables we’ve been buying for the last decade, when the next chapter in HDTVs enters the marketplace.

That’s because of a development called HDMI 2.0 (where HDMI stands for High Definition Multimedia Interface), which aims to resolve what could’ve been a “last foot bottleneck” for super-fat video streams, like 4K television.

The concern, before 2.0 surfaced, was that yet another core device in our digital lives (the television) would need a new connector and cable. Again!

If you’re in a household with an iPhone4 and an iPhone5, or an older and newer iPad, or an older or newer Macbook Air, you know how irritating this is.

On the surface, HDMI 2.0 solves one in a long chain of obstacles facing 4K/UltraHD television: Available bandwidth, at the very last juncture before images and sound reach the eyeballs and ears. Meaning the cable and connector that feeds the TV.

When native 4K content becomes available (ETA: anyone’s guess), it will be substantially bigger than the best HD you’ve yet seen. Even with the best compression on the market today (H.264), 4K weighs in at 17 Megabits per second (Mbps.) That’s a lot.

HDMI 2.0 expands the connectivity bandwidth to 18 Gigabits per second, and, more importantly, increases the number of frames per second (fps) to 60. That’ll be good for sports and gamers; most movies are shot at 24 frames per second, and that’s unlikely to change.

And, that bandwidth can be manipulated to serve up two lower-resolution streams, on the same screen. For when you want to watch the movie and your mate wants to play Space Biff, I s’pose.

But wait! There’s more: Way better audio. HDMI 2.0 offers 32 audio channels, up from eight.

And now let’s talk about those things that might connect over HDMI 2.0. Right now, native 4K content is pretty limited. That’s likely to persist, at least until cameras, production trucks and workflow tools catch up.

Optical disc technologies, like Blu-Ray, are also among the things in the UltraHD landscape that likely don’t have a big enough carrying capacity. So it’s unlikely that we’ll be getting 4K content via packaged media/DVDs anytime soon.

What about set-top boxes, gateways, and those things in the home that deliver cable channels to TVs? Alas. They’re not likely to take a software download that bumps their HDMI connector to 2.0 status, but, that’s not the end of the world. Delivering 4K will almost assuredly require a new box anyway, because they’ll need the newer form of decompression – HEVC, for High Efficiency Video Coding (which also goes by h.265.)

Regardless, any technological development that doesn’t necessitate the purchase of new connectors, wires or chargers, is ok by me.

This column originally appeared in the Platforms section of Multichannel News.