Friday, May 2, 2008

A good idea doesn't equal a good business

Sezmi has me excited & nostalgic. I was captivated by the idea when it was USDTV. That company's long gone, but the idea of using wasted bandwidth of broadcast stations still intrigues me.
I have so many ...I don't want to call them bad... let's say "underutilized" ATSC TV stations around me, I'd love to see someone buy up all those excess bits & do something useful with them. I count 5 stations doing SD with no subchannels. I would imagine that could carry a lot of additional content if someone would just lease the bandwidth. It would be additional income for marginal broadcasters, and more programming choice for viewers.
Let's hope someone finds a successful business model, so this can actually get done.

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Groking Ephemera

They say memories fade. I'm realizing this in new ways as I unearth shoeboxes filled with shards of history preserved on dead formats... reels of mysterious 8mm film, brittle paper envelopes stuffed with curling orange negatives that I take to be from 110 & 120 cartridge film. They seem to be 16 & 35mm stock respectively but the perfs & framesizes are odd. I think they're all that's left of countless 'Kodak moments' snapped on long lost instamatics. Eyeballing the negatives is intriguing. There seem to be photos from the 1964 NY World's Fair, countless family moments I can't make out, and heaven knows what else.
I want to reclaim these fading ...and curling... memories, but I don't yet have a clue how. I've only begun my search for saving old formats, but the results aren't promising so far. Oh well, these things sat & mouldered in shoeboxes for decades, I guess they can wait a little longer until I can figure how to best restore them.
Too bad the Library of Congress (or any other country's archivists) don't have an online how-to for home restoration/preservation of personal history. If they do, I have yet to find it.