The upfront season is underway and the cable hype has begun. As each network unveils its fall schedule and strategy, it generates a fair amount of industry press. Many of these stories don't focus on ratings, of course, because most cable networks don't have good audience stories to tell.

Continuing on last week's theme of PVRs and DVRs, we now take a look at the range of DVRs available in the market today from those that are self contained boxes within the home (such as the TIVO box) to others that are accessed via the Set-Top Box or through a remote server. Here is a list of all types of DVRs currently available along with their definitions:

Is Donald Trump a "carnival barker"? Are his collective media appearances of late the stuff of a "sideshow"? President Obama seemed to suggest as much during a very brief press conference yesterday in which he attempted to put to rest the largely Trump-fueled frenzy over the validity of his birth documents. I'll leave it to others to determine whether such words apply to Trump's mission to verify Obama's personal history. I will assert, however, that they describe perfectly the Trump we have been watching this year on NBC's "Celebrity Apprentice."

Sometimes we think we know something about a subject only to discover, as William Goldman once said about Hollywood, "nobody knows anything." Such may be the case with creativity, the necessary but missing element in our MediaTech business. purview of others and, as a former U.S. Secretary of D

In last week's column I wrote about the television industry's continued search for supplements to -- and ultimately, replacements for -- the dead weight (i.e., the "Bernie" of "Weekend at Bernie's") of traditional media measurement: age-sex demos.This week I want to show you why more and more buyers and sellers of media are moving away from using current currency by itself and toward more actionable set-top-box data paired with other types of data: behavior-based, and -- for our purposes here -- purchase-based.

Once called Personal Video Recorders, Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) enable viewers to pre-record programs and view them at their convenience in trick play modes. DVRs are also touted as one of the major forms of commercial avoidance, which has in turn led to numerous research studies that try to understand the impact of DVR usage.

Lisa Joy Rosner, CMO of NetBase, is not only on the cutting edge of social media research and marketing, she is also an expert in e-commerce and CPG trends. In this interview, Lisa Joy talks about NetBase and its proprietary insight and analysis of social media for marketers, the issue of privacy in the digital arena and the mind of the new consumer. She also posits some predictions about the media landscape and what we can expect from social media in the years to come.

If you'll indulge me this week, I'd like to cover a couple of topics of interest in MediaTech. On Conferences: I attended two last week. There continues to be a steady drumbeat of discussion on the subjects of targeting and measurement, very often by the same strong voices.

"Age/sex demos are dead." So went the refrain last week at the NAB Show in Las Vegas and, later, at an event my company co-hosted in New York. But despite all the chatter, and despite the industry's consistently and increasingly warm reception of the new generation of media-measurement solutions, many marketers seem inexplicably (to me at least) reluctant to let go of traditional television ratings.

We have Set-Top Boxes, whether Analog or Digital and hardware that helps to migrate from analog to digital. But there are ways to transmit signals that either bypass the box entirely or that are in place of a box, whether it is considered Over The Air (OTA) or Over The Top (OTT). In either case, the method of capturing usage data from the box faces challenges.