Thursday’s program at the HPA Tech Retreat began with a Washington update from Jim Burger of Washington law firm Dow Lohnes Naturally, the DTV transition was a key topic. As we know, the Feb. 17 deadline was moved to June 12.

Burger reported that 69 million still receive over the air analog TV in the US, and that according to Nielsen, 6.5 million are not ready for DTV.

Burger addressed the problem of the DTV converter box coupon program, which currently has 3 million on a waiting list because the funding ran out (although not everyone who ordered coupons have used them). Burger reported that the federal government committed an additional $65 million to the program in the stimulus bill.

Content identification was up next. A highlight was a case study about the Beijing Olympics, presented by Sheau Ng of NBC Universal. He said:

–Real time fingerprinting technologies were used for the Beijing Olympics. As part of the workflow, each feed was kept in a remote database. This went hand in hand with manual work before the content reached the Internet.

–Olympics broadcast coverage continues to grow. The Sydney games produced 422 hours of content; Athens, 1219 hours; and Beijing, 1371 hours (with an additional 2200 hours of live streaming on NBCOlympics.com, there were an estimated 3600 hours in total).

–16 output formats

–Bandwidth: 80 feeds in and over 100 feeds out, used 1620 Mbps.

–Results: 3500 live Internet streams, 10 million hours watched on the web, 7 million mobile views.

–33% increase in cable viewership, 7 in 10 American watched the Beijing Olympics on TV. It’s hard to say if new media boosted old media, or the other way around.

–23,000 fingerprints generated; 99% of content was distributed legally.

–Lessons learned: Fingerprint technology is sound; expect to see more big sports events using similar content protection; illegal digital content distribution can be kept under control; socio-political aspects are key in successful use of the technology.

–Conclusion: Even with free, widespread, legal access to content on TV, VOD, Internet and mobile platforms, content identification still requires research and work.

The HPA Tech Retreat’s Thursday program began with breakfast roundtable discussions. One of the most crowded sessions—where there is clearly a lot of interest both in and beyond Hollywood–offered a look at the Digital Video Package initiative, chaired by Disney’s Annie Chang.

Chang provided an overview of the effort of Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony and Warner Bros., working under the ETC@ USC umbrella, to create recommendations for an industry standard for master digital files, which would be used to send entertainment content to broadcasters, Internet sites and mobile service providers. The DVP would be used in B2B settings between content providers and content distributors.

Chang reported that the goal is to complete the recommendations by year’s end, and to submit them to SMPTE for standardization.