The gender divide, as my neighbor's wife pointed out last night at dinner, is rarely more apparent than when waiting for a table at a restaurant. Six of us were having a drink while the bartender was busy changing the channel to the Denver Broncos vs. San Diego Chargers game -- at my neighbor Mike's request. We herded our wives so that they sat between us and the plasma television....

With the new television season upon us, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on last season. Oh wait, I can't remember last season....

We all know about the phenomenon of people using their computers while watching TV. We even know something about how many people (claim to) do it.

On Sept. 18 in New York City at The Helen Mills Theater, MPG & MediaContacts, Havas siblings, will launch The Collaborative Alliance, a quarterly forum where content creators, technologists, distributors and researchers meet to vet their interactive televisual propositions (television, broadband, wireless and out of home).

A friend and I were having lunch the other day in New York when a mutual acquaintance stopped by our table. She grabbed my companion by the arm and dropped the Council for Research Excellence's set-top box data RFP on the table. "Can I get your answer today?" she asked politely...."Thank you for thinking of me, but I'm not really interested." he replied. When she was out of earshot, my friend picked up the abandoned request for proposals document and said to me, "Why would anyone who knows anything about set-top box data participate in this sham?"

ABC would have us believe a Geena Davis feminist would be our modern-day president. Fox's 24 had us imagining Dennis Haysbert epitomized the first African-American president. By reading the TV leaves, I think they both got it wrong....

Bearing in mind its overwhelming dominance in our daily media lives, it's kind of ironic that in these days of cross-media, interactive, personalized and socially networked media, the TV remains the most primitive of all screens available to us. While TV continues to take the lion's share of our time with all media (and of all screen-based media); while it continues to take the lion's share of revenues and capital investment; and while it retains a deeply embedded position in our culture as reference point and provider of information and entertainment, the extent of true innovation in the medium over …

Last week, Nielsen Media Research, as underwriter of the Council for Research Excellence (38 clients of NMR plus two representatives of Nielsen), initiated an RFP (request for proposals): "The Set Top Box and Audience Research: The State of the Art." The 'excerpted' purpose...

While the jury is still out on the technology, addressability promises to deliver content where and when advertisers desire. Addressable creative will require more thought, more planning, a robust knowledge of the target audience and arguably larger budgets, but advertisers and their agencies seem intrigued by the gains in efficiency. So, then, why aren't more advertisers calling for trials?

Now I say this up front -- this week's article isn't about ad metrics, ad-buys, CPMs, technologies that syndicate in or out, or anything else that occupies our daily professional lives. This is about how television showed us history in the making and how film is now able to remind us of those moments and to shed light on a powerful story that was buried in a video camera.