Through the Wire

Rupert Makes Merry With High-Def Wish

Rupert Murdoch may be getting ahead of himself. By a year.

“By Christmas, we’ll probably have 100 high-definition channels, something that no cable company will be able to do,” he told a packed house in a ballroom at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York Tuesday, during the Goldman Sachs Communacopia XV conference.

The chairman of globe-girdling News Corp. is counting on high-definition video services to differentiate its DirecTV satellite service from cable competitors, which have been enjoying huge success this year with triple-play combinations of video, Internet and phone services for about $100 a home.

And that same afternoon, at that same conference, DirecTV Inc. CEO Chase Carey promised a “great lineup” of high-definition programming that he intimated would include all the best cable and broadcast networks, from ESPN to NBC.

But he didn’t promise a 100-channel lineup by Christmas of 2006.

“We have an agenda in high-definition next year that will put us leaps ahead of the competition,” he said.

But the leaps definitely won’t come this year. There’s no way DirecTV, which is 38%-owned by News Corp., can hope to put out 100 channels of HDTV for this joyous season.

The satellites that will give DirecTV the capacity to carry that many nationwide HD channels won’t be launched until the first half of next year, Carey noted.

Meaning Rupert will have to wait until Christmas of next year.

Cross-Pollination, Hollywood Style

It may be hard to get the image of a repressed gay funeral director out of one’s head while watching Showtime’s new series Dexter, a darkly comic show about a police blood-spatter expert who commits homicides in his spare time.

After all, Dexter is played by Michael C. Hall, who starred as the funeral director on the critically acclaimed HBO series Six Feet Under.

But there are more similarities behind the camera. One of the producers for Hall’s former premium series was Robert Greenblatt, who’s now Showtime’s president of entertainment.

At a screening for the series last week in Los Angeles, Greenblatt said he’s “attracted to anti-heroes,” so when he was introduced to the novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter, he knew it could be perfect for Showtime. Greenblatt sent the pilot script to Hall as he was ending Six Feet Under. He feared the actor wouldn’t want to do another show with dead bodies, but Hall took the role.

The actor got to work with another Six Feet Under alumnus: Co-executive producer Michael Cuesta directed four episodes of the HBO series. Cuesta also directed the Dexter pilot, helming the series through its initial paces only six days after Hurricane Rita hit South Florida in September of last year.

The writer who adapted the novel for Showtime also has cable roots: James Manos Jr. formerly was the consulting producer on the Emmy-winning series The Shield on FX.

At the screening, Greenblatt also noted that another Showtime series, The Brotherhood, has already been renewed.

What’s In A Name? Don’t Even Ask

The telecommunications geeks may have finally jumped the shark.

For proof, witness Motorola Inc.’s press release issued last week regarding its new voice-enabled cable modem. It starts out conventionally enough, noting that among other things, the new SBV5100 modem — clearly a name picked by the engineers, not the marketing group — includes support for a whole host of fancy telecom standards, including Session Initiation Protocol, PacketCable Multimedia and the yada, yada, yada.

But the release also noted that the device was capable of supporting several flavors of firewall traversal technologies including this dandy: “Simple Traversal of User Datagram Protocol (UDP) Through Network Address Translators.”

Now, before you apply your well-honed Acronym Translation Logic (ATL) and assume that the proper technical shorthand for this is STUDPTNAT, think again. It appears even that is way too complicated for the telecom geeks, who have decided that the acronym should be simply STUN.

Perhaps they were trying to avoid the longer acronym being garbled into STUPIDNAT. But whatever the case, it indicates that we now are in an era where we must shorten the acronym shorthand.

Praises Raised On High (Speed)

To some high-speed Internet customers, the service is like manna from heaven. Then again, some customers are more heavenly than others.

WildBlue, which delivers Internet access via satellite, came across Sister Elizabeth Hague, the mother superior at a Catholic religious community in Hopedale, Ohio, as a result of some marketing-outreach efforts. She offered up the following endorsement: “We are all so happy to have fast Internet service now with WildBlue. It really helps to be able to do things more quickly. My time is so valuable and now I don’t have to spend hours waiting for very slow dial-up. What a relief! Thank you WildBlue. You will be in our prayers here at The Order of the Sacred and Immaculate Hearts of Jesus and Mary!”

More importantly, she sent in a photograph.