Hasta La Gadget!

If the new studio at Fox News, with its big-ass touchscreens, looks a little bit like Minority Report, that’s because it’s just like Minority Report.

Oblong, the same company that helped create the technological interfaces seen in the futuristic movie, outfitted the new studio with a product called Mezzanine, powered by G-Speak, allowing Shepard Smith to drag and drop videos on a wall like he’s directing an orchestra.

John Underkoffler, Chief Scientist at Oblong, confirmed Fox News’ use of the Mezzanine product to TechCrunch, calling “the whole undertaking a laudably ambitious undertaking on the part of Fox News.”

You’ll notice at At 2:47 in this video, as well as 3:25, that Shepard Smith uses a 38-foot remote-controlled video wall manipulated by a white hand-held wand tool. This is Mezzanine.

Mezzanine is a product created by Oblong Industries meant to be a conference room technology, letting users control and manipulate every pixel in the room, from the massive screens in the Fox News studio to the wifi-connected iPhones, iPads and laptops in the room. With the wand, the same one you see Shepard Smith waving around in the video, you can drag and drop info, zoom, manipulate, and edit information as you go.

“Fox News Deck installation is the most publicly visible (permanent) deployment of Oblong’s technology in general, and of the Mezzanine product in particular, to date,” said Underkoffler.

MG Siegler, who’s used the technology before, calls it the future of computing and refers to the Mezzanine Wand as a WiiMote on steroids.

But Mezzanine isn’t the end product. Underkoffler, speaking at TC Italy less than a month ago, explained that Oblong wants to give a soul to your devices and to the interface. G-Speak, the spatial operating system behind all of Oblong’s products, is the path towards that soul.

For now, Mezzanine requires a wand, but eventually technology that can already sense gloves and hands will be commodotized, and G-Speak will power a new generation of hand-waving computer conductors. Knowing that, it’s clear that Shepard Smith’s 38-foot video wall is far cooler than the giant touchscreens filling up the Fox News studio.

Here’s a look at MG’s video from a while back:

What you see above is actually a snapshot of a video that depicted a certain Shepard Smith making a tour of the Fox News deck, and boy is it a drool-worthy experience that would make even the most technologically phobic person feel this skip in his or her her that has never been felt before. After all, who would not want to have large 55” touchscreen displays as their workstation of choice?

Fox’s new News Deck will also sport a “Twitter wall”, so to speak, and you should be able to figure out just what is it used for – to display tweets by folks who are avid fans of Fox News’ network as they share their two cents with the rest of the world. How soon will the Fox News employees get used to this particular setup? Certainly it is a step in the right direction, where the newsroom itself has been transformed into a futuristic setting that could very well be mistaken for the command deck of a certain U.S.S. Enterprise.

Good to see that these 55” displays come with what might be deemed as a decent viewing angle, so one needs not have to worry about stuff like glare. What would you do to get a job with such a high-tech layout?

Fox News Deck Looks Like The Starship Enterprise original content from Ubergizmo.

Quick: what’s the difference between a broadcast TV network (Fox, CBS, ABC and NBC) and a cable channel (TBS, TNT, ESPN, etc.)? Oh, only millions and millions of viewers. Nevertheless, Fox’s COO Chase Carey is perturbed enough by the mere thought of Aereo getting its way, that he’s already claiming that the network will go dark in favor of becoming a cable channel — if and when OTA network streaming over the internet is completely legalized, that is. Causticism aside, Carey’s remarks are certainly indicative of how the networks feel about the potential disruption of their revenue stream, and moreover, showcases just how far we are from living in a world that isn’t dominated by the same old processes when it comes to entertainment.

Carey stated: “We need to be able to be fairly compensated for our content. This is not an ideal path we look to pursue, but we can’t sit idly by and let an entity steal our signal. We will move to a subscription model if that’s our only recourse.“

Is it possible that Fox would suddenly vanish from over-the-air antennas everywhere, screwing up countless programming agreements with a near-endless amount of partners? Sure… but it’s also possible that the ninth circle of Hades will be converted into an NHL arena. We’re calling your bluff, Carey.

Update: According to the New York Times, Univision chairman Haim Saban joined the saber rattling, stating that his network is ready to consider all options, including converting to pay-tv.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, Internet, HD

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Source: Bloomberg