Interactive TV Big Bang Theory; Local TV News Takes A Holiday; Plus Other Observations From the Passing Parade - Simon Applebaum - MediaBizBloggers

Any day now, those 100,000-plus Apple iPhone store applications, thousands of Motorola Droid applications powered up by Google's Android operating system, and so many more application creators, may get the interactive TV break they've been waiting for.

Any day now, Verizon's FiOS TV will break loose with its modified open source set-top box strategy, where third party developers can deliver interactive content and services directly to FiOS's more than 2.5 million customers nationwide. The plan follows FiOS's success with its Widget Bazaar, where attractions from Twitter to fantasy football stats run on the TV screen.

Verizon may let the world know when next week, during its presentation at UBS's annual global media conference in New York. No time better to go public than at the biggest investor gathering of its kind. We also could get news in the same vein from AT&T, whose mobile phones link with Apple's iPhone store, and whose U-verse subsidiary is FiOS' chief overbuild rival. AT&T and U-verse officials have hinted in recent weeks that they have a front burner ITV set-top agenda and want lots of those iPhone apps involved.

And whether or not a Comcast/NBC Universal deal comes together by conference week, it will be interesting to see if Comcast, the nation's largest MSO, has anything to share at UBS about its own interactive TV handiwork. In past UBS meets, Comcast executives have been generous with info about how their video-on-demand, high-speed Internet access and telephony adventures make out. We could get some clues as to how fast cable and satellite distributors will react to the all-out ITV marketplace FiOS and U-verse want to generate.

Worth repeating: if you're an iPhone app producer or Web site provider, have an interactive TV adaptation in your front pocket. Your big break may be any day now.

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Here's the latest milepost in local television station newsland: KSEE, NBC's affiliate in Fresno, California, didn't do a newscast this past Thanksgiving. There will be no newscasts on that station Christmas Day or New Year's Day either. In one of the first calls by new KSEE president/general manager Matt Rosenfeld, every member of the station's news department has all three holidays off. The action was described as "staff-friendly" in The Fresno Bee's report by TV/movie critic Rick Bentley.

What's staff-friendly here is more public-unfriendly, and the latest detestable news direction TV stations are going, amid a collapsed local advertising sales scene. All year long, stations around the country have cancelled newscasts, such as WWOR-TV New York's weekend editions. In one extreme case, CBS affiliate WYOU in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, dropped its entire local news output. Now we have KSEE telling its community that if, God forbid, a big story breaks on a major holiday, it will leave the coverage to others because its staff won't be around.

What KSEE could have done to make both staff and public happy is rotate its journalist team so some worked Thanksgiving, others on Christmas and New Year's, and do at least one newscast each day. Instead, KSEE has blazed a new trail for other stations to consider for holidays to come.

For years, local news and local programming was considered the edge TV stations had over cable operators. That edge is falling apart. Instead, station management and broadcast network affiliate boards should find ways to insure that local news is the last, not the first, head on the money-saving chop block.

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Pawn Stars is the newest primetime series on The History Channel, now promoting itself on-air as History. Maybe you can explain how Ice Road Truckers or Ax Men fits the network's aspirations. A series about pawnbrokers...how un-History can you go?

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By now you may know that Bill Bresnan, whose Bresnan Communications multi-system operation reaches more than 300,000 Rocky Mountain cable customers, passed away the day after Thanksgiving at age 75, after a battle with cancer few media officials or observers knew of.

By now you may have read some or all the obits about Bresnan's accomplishments: guiding force behind C-SPAN, CableLabs and Cable in the Classroom.

Here are two more things you should know. Bresnan championed diversity in television before many executives concluded it's the right, or smart, or important thing to do. He did so in a variety of ways, such as his support of the Emma Bowen Foundation, which gives high school students extensive internships with leading TV organizations.

The second: Bresnan was all class with people, always knowing your name when meeting you at an event, always interested in what you were up to, always reaching out with a handshake. You couldn't see an ugly bone sticking out anywhere. Not one, not anytime or anywhere.

Whether he knew the end of his life was near or not, Bresnan made sure his company was in good hands, stepping down as CEO before Thanksgiving and turning the job over to one of his long-standing associates. Another example of class in action.

Bill Bresnan lived a whole, complete life, and everyone who works in the medium, or watches the medium, is better that he did.

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Simon Applebaum is producer/host of Tomorrow Will Be Televised, the Internet radio program covering the TV scene. The program runs live Mondays and two Fridays a month at 3 p.m. Eastern time/noon, Pacific time overwww.blogtalkradio.com, with replays available atwww.blogtalkradio.com/simonapplebaum. Tomorrow is also available on podcast, downloadable to any major mobile device via an assortment of Web download sites arranged bywww.sonibyte.com. Have a question or comment? Send it tosimonapple04@yahoo.com.