Now more than ever, those of us who are bringing new Internet- style technologies to the TV medium need to be cognizant of its incredible power.

Jack Myers, Chairman and Media Economist for the Media Advisory Group, is one of the leading media prognosticators in the industry. His Jack Myers Media Business Report and the Survey of Advertising Executives have become industry standards and continue to help media companies serve their customer base and plan for the future.

One would think that something as ubiquitous as a Remote would have a simple definition. However it is not as simple as it would first appear. While there are several industry definitions for a Remote Control (indicting a hardware device), there are other terms related to Remotes that are data-specific.

>Reports are circulating that Al Jazeera English, the "toned down" version of Al Jazeera, has been making rounds this week among some of America's largest cable operators, including Philadelphia-based Comcast.

This just in from former TV Board columnist and well-known collaborator Mitch Oscar, who has aked us to let the TV Board community know that they're welcome to attend a special session of MPG's Collaborative Alliance, which will be held Thursday from noon to 2:30 at MPG's New York headquarters on the 12th floor of 195 Broadway in Manhattan.

Despite the headline, this is not a commentary on the Middle East -- which makes me one of the few people not publishing uninformed opinion. Some years ago, the visionary CEO of a direct marketing agency approached a speaker's podium with the song, "Two Different Worlds" playing in the background. His message was simple: that direct-to-consumer marketing rests primarily on the principle of relevance -- and that principle was going to be increasingly important as mass media platforms gave way to more specialized digital platforms with unique communications characteristics and attributes. But he wasn't talking to direct marketers; he was …

Online advertising has been coming under a good degree of scrutiny lately, and television may not be far behind. As new technologies evolve to tell us more about who's watching what, it seems highly likely to me that one of these days some flavor of "Do Not Track" will be applied to the television platform. The question is, who among us will be prepared?

Thomas Jefferson's a busy guy for someone who's been dead for almost 200 years. His blog, Virginian Red, is one of the most-read on the eternal plain (www.virginiared.al - don't bother checking the url. Heaven has its own AL domain, which is only available in the afterlife). So to help honor Presidents' Day on Monday, with a bit of luck (and a few well-connected Facebook friends' help), I had the opportunity to sit down with our country's third President to talk about television, Snooki, and why America's not so bad as we roll on towards our third century.

Continuing on last week's discussion of Return Path Data, which is a more accurate term for what we tend to call Set-Top Box data, we now take a look at the term "Back Channel" also known as Back Path or Back Haul. It is the existence of the Back Channel that enables us to receive the data from its various source points. But the mere existence of a Back Channel is not a guarantee of receiving a full range of data gathered on the box. Some Back Channels, lacking bandwidth, do not have enough capacity to return a full range …

This evening, the world learns the answer to the burning question on everybody's mind: "Are the TV game shows of the future safe for humanity?" Personally, I believe all game shows are in jeopardy unless the producers and networks embrace the reality that it's not an IBM supercomputer that threatens to make on-air game show contestants -- and the genre -- irrelevant.