Photo by John Cox
Copyright 2009 Capitol Broadcasting Company

WRAL-TV likes being first, this time the Capital Broadcasting Company has partnered with the city of Raleigh, NC. to offer DTV on the cities buses. Right now there is one equipped vehicle with four planned for this summer.

"We are proud to be the pilot to offer mobile digital television to the riders of the Downtown Circulator," stated Raleigh Mayor Charles Meeker. "We salute WRAL for being pioneers in mobile digital television as they were in high definition television. We look forward to the day when all of Raleigh's CAT buses will offer this means of information and relaxation."

Mobility on buses is not new, at least to the rest of the world. Singapore has had WiFi available since late 2007 in partnership with Nokia Singapore.
 

WRAL-TV News Coverage

Related ipTVe article from July 31, 2008: WRAL-TV MPH

Related ipTVe article from August 2nd, 2008: Jay Adrick, VP of Broadcast Technology for Harris Broadcast

The New York State recently extended a 350 million tax credit for the film industry to try and spur feature and series production in the state, see this news report on Facebook

While feature projects and TV shows may not be attracted to New York State this year what about trying to leverage iTV projects? Certainly most people are familiar with Quarterlife and it's large budget for iTV (many would say too large) however, there is a lot of great programming and projects that could employ people at rates lower then the Quarterlife budget, should these be encouraged at the State level through incentives and or tax credits?

April 12th, update.
We sent New York State Senator Kruger who sits on the intersection of spending on this front some questions however, his office declined to reply.