I'm at the HD Expo today. It's the first time it's been held in New York (it will also be repeated in LA next month<>) and is happening at the Waterfront, which you seasoned NYers may remember from it's halcyon days as The Tunnel, and scene of more than a few filmings. Whenever a TV show (or film) needed to have a scene in a club, they invariable filmed it in The Tunnel.

So it's oddly appropriate to have all the HD cameras set up all over, not to mention having the likes of John Gilroy, (ACE "Michael Clayton") and Steve Wax here to discuss branded entertainment and viral campaigns such as for True Blood, the latter in the session on "A Conversation About Revolution and What’s Next: Telling Stories, Branding and Community In A State of Change"

The sessions I'm mainly interested in are the ones on Building a Content Delivery Network for Internet TV, which is ultimately what the Open Media Project is aiming at, as well as the CS4 preview, a 2 hour intensive that proved Adobe's latest release isnt' nearly as bad as its new logo might lead you to believe. There was also an exciting session dedicated to Sports Networks; since I see a day when MNN will have a dedicated sports channel for inner-city sports.

The CDN intensive was sponsored by NeuLion, who showcased their product, but also covered a wide range of solutions from IPTV to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_television" title="It differs from IPTV in that IPTV offerings are typically offered on discrete service provider networks,requiring a special IPTV set-top-box">Internet TV</a> And I was frankly impressed at the balance struck between board room jargon with an understanding of the underlying technolgies." (Corporate jargon alert: "What's the uplift on that?")

The session covered a complete HD workflow from signal aquisition and encoding where the signal is simultaneously aquired and ingested (into a profile) all the way to the various approaches to web playout such as CDN populating strategies (eg. deep-caching vs. peering.) This last piece is the one thing that not yet part of the <>Open Media Platform.<>  One trend you've probably noticed if you've paid any attention to Internet TV approaches is that the old model of show syndication is giving way to one of *player* syndication (eg. Facebook.)

 I'll address these topics in more detail later as well as highlights from the CS4 preview. Keep Watching!