Last week's premiere of "The Newsroom" on HBO marked the return of Aaron Sorkin's special brand of premium television.It makes sense that Sorkin -- whose previous shows, "The West Wing, "Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip," and "Sports Night," aired on NBC, NBC, and ABC respectively -- has turned for the first time to pay cable giant HBO as distributor rather than traditional television networks. The initial financial commitment to a series like this requires a huge cash outlay, and content producers/distributors today must consider the cash-certainty of the business model they are working with.

Even as the big broadcast networks continue killing off or otherwise compromising their daily daytime dramas - the only genre of television programming they can still call their own - a basic cable network has stepped up to prove that soap operas don't have to die. They simply need to adapt to changing times. If that means migrating from broadcast to cable, so be it. The network at the forefront of what could become just such a shift for soaps is Nick at Nite, which two weeks ago premiered a one-hour week-night serial titled "Hollywood Heights." Based on the Mexican …

GroupM Chairman Irwin Gotlieb stated at his keynote at the recent ARF Audience Measurement 7.0 conference, that the media industry needs to create standard measurement definitions. CIMM could not agree more. It has been our contention that the development of a common language would help facilitate the integration of Return-Path data into media measurement and move audience measurement forward in the digital media world.

A few weeks ago I wrote about what I saw as the transition of the definition of "television." I started to think about this issue when Nielsen recently lowered its Total U.S. Universe estimate of Television households -- the second time in as many years. But is "television" -- or even "television households," for that matter -- really best defined using a hardware-based television set definition? And if so, shouldn't it contain all hardware platforms on which one can receive television-based content? Not surprisingly, others in the industry are also re-examining the concept of television and what it has become …

So after all the predictions that HBO's "Girls" would be the next "Sex and the City" and hosannas about how great it was that women would finally (finally?) get a voice on television, it turns out that the largest audience for this show was men. According to Nielsen's Live +7 ratings, which includes a week of DVR playback, an average of 712,00 men watched "Girls" over the first eight weeks of the season, compared to 573,000 women.

I wonder if "The Glass House" will actually last through the summer, or if it will become such an embarrassment that ABC might pull it off air and let it play out online (or, perhaps worse, move it from its current Monday time period to the wasteland of Saturday night). It's been a while since I have referred to a so-called reality series as truly "toxic." I mean, given the mountain of unscripted product out there, much of it trash, it seems near-ridiculous to single one out as somehow worse than the rest and label it poisonous. But this cruddy …

Standardization, whether of terms, definitions, edit rules, measurement protocols or watermarking remains an important consideration in RPD measurement rollout progress. To that end, CableLabs has developed EBIF, a format that standardizes content formats to facilitate not only better use of the data for measurement, but also in addressable advertising and interactivity. Here are all the terms and definitions associated with EBIF:

We've all heard about "generation gaps" where there are completely different perspectives and attitudes on a range of subjects based on an individual's age and place in the society. The biggest generation gaps occur during periods of great transformation, when protocols of the past seem out of sync with current problems. Because of the great transformation going on in the media industry today, we wondered if there was a "generation gap" about future trends within our industry. Do those who have been working in media since pre-cable days (those with more than 25 years of media experience) have different ideas …

The new series everyone will be talking about next week is HBO's "The Newsroom," a timely drama about the staff at a cable news program that was created and is written by the quick-witted if somewhat long-winded Aaron Sorkin. Even with its flaws, it is the most exciting and satisfying new series of the year.

Connectivity is fast becoming a standard expectation of television viewers through their use of such offerings as VOD and in connected TV. This week's column addresses the rollout of a standard operating system and platform for connectivity by CableLabs - OCAP, which led to Tru2way.