I’ve been back from CES for a couple of weeks now, and I think I’m finally over it. Sure enough, there were record crowds, so I was right about that. Best highlights:

• Justin Bieber appeared at the TOSY Robotics booth. I would have thought that the over-18 attendee requirement would have locked out his fans, but there was a modest crowd forming as I walked past. I was more impressed by their drawing robot (pictured here). I wonder if these folks saw Hugo?
• Earth, Wind & Fire performed a stunning, underpromoted 30-minute set on the Sony campus. (Seriously, I’ve been to other shows that were smaller than just the Sony booth.) Now we’re talking my generation.
• Dream Multimedia, the folks behind the Dreambox FTA receiver, had a booth. The folks there said they’re planning a push into North America. More on that in a future post here.

Unlike some previous years, I attended CES as just a plain old “industry affiliate”. There’s no magic to this; if you want to go next year, I already told you how you can qualify. If you want to know what it’s like to attend CES as press, Rob Beschizza explained it well in a post a couple of days ago at BoingBoing. I would only add that if you’re not press, you don’t need to come on Day 0 (as he puts it), which means that you need at least Day 2 to see everything on the floor. Day 3 is probably unnecessary, and Day 4 is garbage day, as I said last year.

More photos from the show:

Dish Network pulled out all the stops in promoting its new Hopper whole-house technology. In addition to this 25-foot plush in front of CES, Dish had huge ads in the official programs and billboard trucks circling the show.

Radiation Hazard? Not for this little DirecTV dish. Do you suppose that sign was meant for the huge satellite uplink trailer instead?

Easily the most frightening thing I encountered at CES this year. This woman wandered the show floor promoting The Stump, which is an iPad stand. You can watch video of her in action here but don't blame me if it gives you nightmares too.

The crowd was pretty thick at CES in 2011 (pictured). Looks like even more will attend this year.

Once again, it’s time to get ready for the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Over the years, I’ve learned to predict attendance based on Las Vegas hotel rates. During the worst of the recession, room rates started at a normal price and went down as the show drew closer. Sure enough, attendance declined. Last year, rooms started a little high and stayed there. Attendance was back to pre-recession levels. This year, it’s crazy.

Every official CES hotel is sold out, at least at the CES rate. The big hotels on the strip are available, but at a price. Per night, the Mirage is $674, the MGM Grand is $613, and even the lowly (but convenient) Riviera is $499.

Downtown used to be a safe haven; the official CES buses don’t go there, but the city bus (#108) does. A few years ago, I had a nice room at the Fremont for $40/night. Now it’s sold out. The Golden Nugget is available at $284/night. Even the Four Queens is $229/night.

This all means two things. First, if you’re coming, I hope you already lined up a reasonable hotel rate. Second, attendance at CES will be incredible. Last year’s crowd was enough to reduce Las Vegas to a snail’s pace. There were long, long lines for cabs, at monorail stations, and at most restaurants. This year will probably be worse. Have fun, but be prepared.

(If you do still need a room, the best under $100/night right now looks like Sam’s Town, which has a shuttle to Harrahs. From there, you can hope to get on the monorail to the convention center, or you can walk across the strip to the Mirage, where you can catch a CES bus.)

Just so you don’t have to, I subscribe to a dizzying list of news streams about broadcasting. In today’s NAB SmartBrief, I saw a headline that stopped me cold: “Feds could benefit more by letting broadcasters lease spectrum, says Sinclair exec”.

The first part of that headline agrees with what I’ve promoted for years. Broadcast spectrum is precious and finite, and it would be only appropriate for anyone using public airwaves to pay rent for the privilege. If the fee were based on a small percentage of advertising sales, then non-profits (who sell no ads) get a free pass but commercial stations get dinged.

The second part of the headline was the punchline. The Sinclair Broadcast Group is a publicly traded corporation that believes strongly in its fiduciary duty to maximize profits for its shareholders. It’s not afraid to make controversial political moves to make sure that happens. It’s not afraid to get into hard-fought retransmission disputes to make sure that happens. From all appearances, Sinclair would rather be profitable than loved. That’s why I was mystified that someone there would agree with my idea, which would benefit society as a whole at a cost of slightly reduced profits.

Then I clicked through to the original TVNewsCheck article, which included an interview with Mark Aitken, Sinclair’s vice president of advanced technology. Aitken’s proposal is for stations to take some of their allotted bandwidth and lease it to wireless carriers. He says, “Currently, broadcasters are obliged to pay 5% of their revenue from supplying auxiliary data services. When you look at the immense capacity that broadcasters could make available to carriers, it adds up to big dollars in revenues for broadcasters and, as a result, big dollars for the U.S. Treasury.”

So rather than paying a tax on the bandwidth that stations use, the plan is for them to take the bandwidth they’re getting for next to nothing, lease it to a third party, then pocket 95% of the rent? Now that sounds more like a Sinclair Broadcast Group proposal!

What would make a better headline for that plan? Leave a comment if you’ve got a good one.

Folks who have watched satellite free-to-air TV for a long time, or long-time readers of this blog, will recognize the name Equity Broadcasting. The basic business model for Equity was to own a whole lot of little TV stations, create the programming for all of them in one centralized place (Little Rock AR), then beam it out for broadcast via satellite. For FTA viewers, the great thing was that those signals were (almost always) unencrypted, which meant that fun and funky programming from over a dozen stations coast to coast were available for viewing from one satellite position.

Sadly, that didn’t last. In December 2008, Equity Media (as it was known then) filed for bankruptcy. After a few months of negotiations, Equity’s TV stations were sold at auction to various new owners. And within another couple of months, all those stations disappeared from satellite.

One of those stations, KKYK of Little Rock, is one of four being sold to two former Equity executives, Larry Morton and Greg Fess. And according to The Hollywood Reporter, Morton is going to be president of a new network, the Soul of the South Network (SSN), which will use KKYK’s studio and production facilities.

Here’s the surprising news from the Hollywood Reporter story: “The new venture has acquired assets from Equity, including the C.A.S.H. system, which stands for Central Automated Satellite Headend. This allows them to program stations anywhere in the country from a single hub in Little Rock. … However, the signal will not actually be fed by satellite. Instead, it will use a computer server ‘cloud based system’ to deliver its programming 24 hours a day.”

So that means that SSN acquired all the equipment that Equity used when it beamed channels all over the country, but it has decided it won’t use satellite this time. There are at least two possible explanations for this:

1. Satellite TV distribution is slowly dying. Satellites are incredibly expensive, and the internet is pretty darned cheap, so IP-based distribution is the wave of the future.

2. SSN might have trouble finding transponder space for rent. Wikipedia says that Intelsat’s claim on Equity in bankruptcy court was over $580,000. Now SSN isn’t Equity, but some of the people are the same, and the headquarters is the same. Would satellite operators treat SSN the way a new landlord treats a prospective tenant who walked out on last year’s rent? I have no idea.

I hope that SSN succeeds. We can always use more digital sub-channels, and we can always use more diversity. SSN’s birthplace will be the same hub that launched the Retro Television Network (RTV), one of the first and best of the sub-channel breed, so that’s a good omen. It’s too bad that SSN won’t be matching RTV’s satellite distribution.

Clear Channel is the USA’s largest owner of radio stations. As such, it’s a bit frightened by the growing popularity of online streaming music services such as Pandora and Google Music. (BTW, I still have a few invitations to the Google Music beta available. If you want one, let me know in a comment.) Anyway, Clear Channel created its own service, iHeartRadio. It’s pretty good, too.

But what broadcasters promote about themselves, and what they really need, is localism. There’s no reason why a company that owns a gazillion radio stations can’t let each one have its local voice, but that’s not what’s happening. Clear Channel is cutting about 500 jobs, mostly local disc jockeys.

I could go on and on about how broadcasters have a responsibility to the local communities they serve, but Kyle Anderson already did it first. Go read it.

Here’s Yet Another Use for an old satellite dish: Building an interferometer. As performed by the National Geographic channel’s Rocket City Rednecks.

The president of the National Association of Broadcasters sent a letter to FCC asking it to stay out of coming retransmission fee disputes. In other words, the NAB doesn’t want the government to interfere when one of its stations holds cable or satellite viewers hostage for a better contract.

Now it’s normal for the NAB to want as much leverage as it can manage so its members can get as much money as they can get. That’s the capitalist way. What galls me is that the letter said the member stations want their negotiations to “remain free and market-based.”

When it comes to any given cable system, there is no “market” for broadcast programming. If a local system wants to show NBC, it can’t shop around to see which broadcaster will sell it at the best price. Its choices are to pay whatever the local NBC affiliate demands or to cause mutually assured damage by dropping NBC. The trouble with the second choice is that it hurts a lot of local NBC viewers as well as the station and the cable system.

For the public good, the government ought to get the cable and satellite systems to sit down with the broadcasters and hash out one equitable retransmission fee formula to be applied to the entire country. Such a formula would probably include an over-the-air channel’s percentage of viewers and the system’s number of subscribers. When a channel’s ratings go up or down, the cable or satellite system would adjust its payments higher or lower. If a channel’s ratings stayed below a certain threshold, it would receive no cash but would stay in the channel lineup, as with must-carry stations now.

The parties could revisit the formula every few years, and that would be it. We’d never see another local station go off a cable system over a retransmission dispute. The broadcasters would receive a truly fair, negotiated fee. But it’ll never happen unless and until the government folks (you know, we the people) insist.

On my Twitter feed, I often point out ways to reuse old satellite dishes. This one looks pretty useful – converting it to a WiFi dish.

This week, a unique delivery platform pulled out of the US market. Sezmi launched in Spring 2010 in Los Angeles, and it provided pretty standard TV fare in an unusual way. Sezmi subscribers used a special DVR to record normal over-the-air programming, pay-per-view movies (if they were hooked to the internet), and some cable networks. The difference was that Sezmi delivered those cable networks through an encrypted OTA signal that the special DVR unscrambled.

Taking a piece of OTA TV spectrum and using it for a pay-TV service is like putting a fence around some park land and charging visitors to get in. The presumption is that it’s a really bad thing for consumers. Sezmi wasn’t providing content that Los Angeles viewers couldn’t get from their cable or satellite TV providers; Sezmi was just doing it cheaper. And it’s easy to do cheaper when you piggyback on a public resource. That’s why I never liked Sezmi.

To be fair, Sezmi dropped the cable channel package less than a year later. It shifted its business model to be more of a standard OTA DVR plus internet-delivered movies. Which is what a Windows computer with Media Center will do for you for free, or what TiVo will do for you (beautifully) for a higher price. Whatever niche was left wasn’t enough, so Sezmi pulled the plug, shifting its focus to reselling its technologies to other providers.

Sure, Sezmi had stopped using OTA spectrum for pay-TV channels, but if I had given it any thought, I would have worried that Sezmi might start using it again if its national rollout of OTA DVRs had ever reached critical mass. So please forgive me for the shadenfreude, but I’m glad to see Sezmi leave town.