The CW -- a mashup of UPN and WB, backed by CBS Corp. and Warner Bros. -- got all the pre-upfront hype. Meanwhile, Fox's upstart MyNetworkTV had quietly secured clearances in 55 percent of the country as of the end of March, with Bob Cook, president and chief operating officer of Twentieth Television, saying he feels "very comfortable" that the figure may edge north of 90 percent by the network's Sept. 5 launch. Set to air on the stations left standing when the CW musical chairs came to a halt, the 18-to-49-targeted MyNetworkTV wants to tweak the conventional network …

Add Mazingo to the list of companies attempting to forge a stronger connection between print media and mobile devices. The British company is keen on delivering just about anything to users' wireless handsets. Here's how the firm's work.

It sounds like a cool idea to take your media with you wherever you go, using technologies like Slingbox Media, LocationFree TV, and Orb Media. But marketers playing catch-up may soon find themselves up against a new competitor: consumers.

My digital video recording habits are pushed, pulled, and forever joined with my wife, Hope Rayman Friedman. Though I write about the entertainment business for a living, Hope had a DVR long before I ever thought about it. Here's the strange part: She was probably one of a handful of people in the United States who had a DVR, but no cable or satellite service.

Television technologies change, but the challenges for TV advertisers don't. You can lead consumers to new products and services with whiz-bang ads, but you can't force them to make a purchase. Take the problem of addressable advertising -- that is, delivering different commercials with relevant messages to different homes.

Sixty years before an island of half-starved reality-show contestants gobbled Doritos on national TV, essentially ushering in the modern branded integration era, advertising agencies worked with clients not only to place products, but to develop complete programs designed to make those products household names.

I miss Uncle Miltie. What a salesman. From the time "Texaco Star Theater" launched in 1948 until it aired its last gag in 1956, some estimates have it that the show, and its clown-king master of ceremonies, Milton Berle, sold 30 million TV sets. How much gasoline the show sold, I don't know. What people thought of Texaco during and after the program's legendary run, I don't know, either.

It seems that 1948 was a very good year for television. There were more than 900 advertisers on TV that year, an astounding 515 percent increase over 1947. "The Ed Sullivan Show," sponsored by Lincoln-Mercury, premiered. B.F. Goodrich sponsored a new series with radio crossover stars George Burns and Gracie Allen. And Milton Berle stole the small screen in September of that year, when "Texaco Star Theater" launched.

Every 15 to 20 years or so, television experiences a kind of identity crisis that redefines how we think about the medium and refines how advertisers and agencies spend money on it. We are now in one of those moments, as TV evolves from a static world of linear telecasting to a dynamic world of nonlinear, anytime/ anywhere video-on-demand that is threatening the very meaning of the word television itself.

Television is having its Sybil moment. Not unlike the title character played by Sally Field in the 1976 made-for-TV movie of the same name, television seems to be suffering from multiple personality disorder. Advances in visual experience, control, technology, display, and the quality and diversity of content have come in such swift succession that the divide between new forms of television and the mainstays seems to widen daily. Consumers now live with broadcast television, cable television, video-on-demand, Internet TV, video iPods, time-shifted television via digital video recorders, and wireless video across an array of devices, just to mention a few …