• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, March 3, 2008

It's hard to believe it's been 15 months since we launched the TV Board to post some expert points-of-view on the future of the small screen. And it's fitting that the very first post was by none other than Jack Myers, a TV industry visionary who's always been one step ahead of the industry. Ironically, Jack's inaugural TV Board his prediction that the 30-second-spot would "soon be obsolete" has not come to fruition.

But it is with mixed feelings that I must inform you that Jack's contribution to the TV board has become obsolete. Much as he said he's enjoyed contributing to the board and getting feedback from the readers of MediaPost, Jack said he needed to change his own publishing model and focus on building JackMyers.com. I will miss his contributions to this board, but Jack says he will remain a TV Board alum and will show up at some of our events, like the TV Board panel discussion at MEDIA magazine's Outfront conference on April 24th in New York.

I'm going to miss Jack for a lot of reasons.

One is that I simply enjoy working with him, and always learn a lot when I do. Another is that I love Jack's envelope-pushing style, and how he is so good at marshaling other people around his visions. Especially his tele visions. We've been lucky to be able to share Jack's vision for so long, but we're also fortunate to have some of the other great visionaries in the industry -- people who don't just predict change, but help to manage it.

Whether she has been on the research, analyst, agency or, as she is now at Paridigm, talent-agency side of the business, Lydia Liozides has always given me a lot to think about the future of, not just television, but media overall.

Likewise, as director of insight and research at Ball State University's Center for Media Design, Mike Bloxham has helped to further our knowledge about how people really use media. An interactive TV pioneer of his own accord before joining BSU, Bloxham has taken the university's academic media research unit from the obscurity of the cornfields surrounding Muncie, Indiana, to the boardrooms of some of the biggest media players in the world.

Nielsen's recent $3.5 million grant for a year-long, multi-market research study utilizing the center's method of directly observing and chronicling how people actually use media promises to be the largest and most significant ethnographic study of media ever in the modern age. It will yield incredible new insights, especially about TV and what it is evolving into. Mark my words, you'll look back 20 years from now, and you'll still be referring to it.

As for Mitch Oscar, our other TV Board founding member, well, without him, this board probably wouldn't exist. It was Mitch's generosity in letting me tail along on some of his Carat Digital Exchange meetings that made me realize how much was going on in the TV futures business, and how much needed to be discussed. The Carat Digital Exchange meetings are a great place to do it, but they are limited to the hundred of so people that Mitch can convince the fire marshals to cram into the boardroom of Carat's headquarters in New York. This board is for the average person in our industry who is as thirsty for knowledge on the future of television as those high-level execs are. They just don't always have access to it.

I first got to know Mitch when he was a media futurist at McCann-Erickson and have stuck close to him as he branched out into his own consulting company Hocus Focus, and eventually, as executive vice president of Carat Digital. And when I have a question about the logic or technical aspects of some interactive TV development, Mitch is always the first person I turn to. Luckily, anyone, even people who aren't clients of Carat, can now tap Mitch's expertise. Mitch has just published "Trials and Defibrillations: Interactive Television in the U.S.," which is the most definitive guide to the interactive TV business that I've ever seen.

It "not only identifies the technological forces behind the burgeoning iTV market, but provides evaluations and an assessment of the advertising value of specific technologies," Frank Foster writes in the recent bulletin of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, synopsizing key passages of the book.

Foster, of course, is the former president of erinMedia, and is an occasional contributor to the TV Board, as well as his former boss, Frank Maggio, who when he's not dueling Nielsen Media Research, has some pretty commonsense views on the medium of television.

I'd like to thank all the contributors to the TV Board, past and present, over the past 15 months. It's hard to imagine that in another 15 months, we'll have taken down the digital TV transition countdown clock on this page and will focus exclusively on life after analog. And who knows, maybe Jack Myers will be back on occasion to weigh in on some of that, too.

Editor's Note: If anyone is interested in contributing to The TV Board, please contact joe@mediapost.com. .