Finding a full broadcast staff to work a two-week-long tennis tournament in late August is never easy, but, with the Summer Olympics and the Democratic National Convention competing for crew members, organizers of the U.S. Open should have been panicked. However, with effective planning and dedicated staffers -– some of whom flew directly from Beijing to Queens, N.Y., to work the Open -– this year’s event not only opened on Monday without a hitch but spread its HD wings as well.

The flame of the Beijing Olympic Games may be extinguished, but, for 4,000 athletes with disabilities, the competition is just getting started. The 2008 Paralympic Games will be held Sept. 6-17 in Beijing, in the same venues that hosted the Olympics a month earlier, and spectators in the U.S. will be able to follow along as Universal Sports provides the first-ever multiplatform broadcast of the event.

It may not be readily apparent as you watch Monday Night Football this season, but ESPN is bringing a new approach and style to its lower-third graphics during the game.

NewTek’s LightWave v9.5 3D software will make graphics on stadium scoreboards and in live Webcasts more realistic then ever. It features an all-new hair and fur solution, a new lighting system, and improvements to animation, rendering, and workflow.

Turner Sports has brought the PGA Tour Shot Tracker to the Web. The capability allows golf fans to track what their favorite golfers are doing and where at all times on PGATour.com.

Dolby, Sony, and Neutrik have announced products to meet a wide range of audio needs, from loudness measurement to a male/female cable connector.

Four new commercials currently airing feature NFL players performing rather miraculous feats to encourage fans to “pick me” for their fantasy football leagues. Each spot in “The NFL.com Fantasy Files,” produced by New York-based Blue Room, is a single shot, handheld, captured using the Panasonic AG-HVX200 HD camcorder.

The video-service industry offers a myriad of options for delivering video to end users, but the creators and producers of that video have thus far been left out of the equation. To fill that gap, Optimum Lightpath has introduced Lightpath Managed Video, an Ethernet-based transport service that allows video experts to worry about their video content, not the expertise required to convert the video between formats.

Avid has launched Avid DS version 10, its latest offering of professional editing, compositing, keying, image-retouching, and paint and graphics capabilities in one application.

NBC Universal Sunday said its coverage of the Beijing Summer Olympics attracted more than 211 million viewers through the first 16 days, eclipsing the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta as the most-watched event in U.S. television history. The Beijing Olympics 16-day average primetime viewership is 27.7 million, 11 percent ahead of Athens in 2004 (24.9 million).

The ratings for NBC's television coverage of the Beijing Olympic Games were record-breaking this month, the New York Times reports. But the extent to which the Internet served as a supplement to television was unprecedented, and there were two clear winners: NBC’s own Web site and Yahoo's Olympics section.

Orad will unveil Morpho 3D 3D character generator (CG) at IBC2008. It's the first SD/HD CG to feature true 3D-graphic capabilities, presenting a shift in 3D-graphics workflows.

ESPN and the Southeastern Conference (SEC) have reached a milestone 15-year agreement beginning in 2009-10 and continuing through 2023-24. The landmark deal – the longest national rights agreement in ESPN history – will result in ESPN entities carrying more than 5,500 SEC events – including football, men’s and women’s basketball, Olympic sports and SEC Championships.

Glowpoint says that Michael Brandofino, the Company's chief executive officer, will present at the 2008 Merriman Curhan Ford & Co. Investor Summit. The Conference is scheduled for the 15th and 16th of September at the Mark Hopkins Intercontinental Hotel in San Francisco.

BBC used Envivio video encoders to deliver live video feeds of the Beijing Olympic Games to its production staff in the UK. The encoders were selected for their ability to deliver high quality video in very low bit rates for delivery over IP networks. The encoders for the Olympics are in addition to other applications where the BBC employs Envivio encoders, including live video contribution for the nightly news.

Harris Corporation has announced that it will integrate technology from Freescale Semiconductor, a global leader in the design and manufacture of embedded semiconductors, into its new TV transmitters for terrestrial broadcasters. Using Freescale's laterally diffused MOS (LDMOS) UHF technology will enable Harris to produce its most compact and power-efficient UHF transmitters.

Comcast has made no final decisions on how to manage network congestion, despite news reports Wednesday that it will slow traffic for heavy users for up to 20 minutes during times of peak network use, the New York Times reports.

Like many at the bustling Google campus here, Keval Desai has a degree in computer science and tends to view things through the lens of mathematics. Even the topsy-turvy world of TV advertising.

Dish Network is touting itself as the first in the pay-TV industry to transmit all standard and HDTV programming in the MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding Standard, according to Multichannel News. The satellite provider claims this was another one of its of industry firsts, including its most recent HDTV expansion; the launch of TurboHD, the only 100% HD service; the availability of movies in Blu-ray Disc quality 1080p resolution; and the commitment to offer up to 150 national HD channels by the end of the year.

Fox Cable Networks has entered into an agreement with Comcast – which has more HD television subscribers than any other distributor -to make its general entertainment flagship FX and top motorsports network SPEED available to Comcast HD subscribers by the end of 2009.

Internet TV services provider Move Networks announced that Microsoft has taken a stake in the company as a strategic investor, Multichannel News reports. Move Networks previously said it would integrate its Internet television services with Microsoft Silverlight, a cross-browser, multiplatform plug-in for delivering Web media that was used by NBC for its Olympic coverage.

No American market has witnessed anything like it: two baseball teams and two football teams will open three new stadiums within 17 months and 20 miles of one another, with everything set to be in place by the fall of 2010.

With the decline of newspapers and radio, Rishad Tobaccowala believes TV may be the only mass medium left in a few years.

When Barack Obama accepts his party’s presidential nomination in front of 76,000 people at Invesco Field in Denver on Thursday, an aerial camera will hover above the turf, using a TV technique normally applied at football games.

Parents who worry that their children watch too much television can take heart: a bigger concern may be children spending too much time online.

Mediacom subscribers who root for the University of Iowa are apparently going to get to watch their Hawkeyes do battle on the gridiron on Big Ten Network this season.

After years of lagging behind European countries, the U.S. is poised to take the top spot for mobile Web usage by month's end, according to data collected by technology firm Bango, which provides mobile Internet access platforms to 100,000 Web sites worldwide.

Time Warner Cable is in the Big Ten Network’s distribution huddle. After sitting out the rookie first season, the nation’s No. 2 cable operator has reached an agreement in principle to carry the sports service on expanded basic. The pact should enable Time Warner Cable subscribers, notably Buckeye fans in Ohio and Badgers fans in Wisconsin, to watch the kickoff of the Big Ten football season on Aug. 30.

With ESPNU ready to kick off its HD service Thursday, the enhanced college sports service has inked distribution deals with five carriers.