Man, I wish I had the budget that the Democrats have.
When I put together a stage and podium for our annual conference, I usually try to have a decent backdrop — that costs nothing. Then I have one or two largish screens for front projection.
The Democrats have a huge rear-projection screen made up, it seems, of 5 separate screens combined to be the ultimate widescreen. I’m loving it, along with the graphics they’re displaying. There are also a bunch of plasma screens behind the podiums, which are a little more silly — it makes it look like a newsroom or something. And those plasma screens are no longer cool, really.
The girl singing the national anthem has a really bad sunburn — you can clearly see the strap marks on her back. She’s kind of mangling the anthem. I really wish people would resist the urge to modulate like crazy during that song. It’s just annoying.
ABC is showing complete coverage of the convention — and the campaign in general — via secondary channels on digital TV stations. I think this is a fantastic use of the new digital television system. “ABC News Now” used to be a show that was on in the middle of the night, now it’s the name of this all news channel. Thus, ABC gets to continue showing their money-making programming on regular stations, and easily create a second channel at the same time. In fact, with the bandwidth on digital television, they could show 4 to 6 different channels at once, depending on the quality of the picture.
Isn’t technology fun?
Chris Cuomo is one of the journalists on ABC News Now. I’ve already voted him my favorite cutie at the convention. He’s also sitting in front of a majorly wide screen at ABC News, the one that’s usually behind Peter Jennings. Love those big screens. I want one SO bad.
Another nice thing about ABC News Now: no commercials. (Oops — spoke too soon — they have PSAs.)
