I ran into our director or broadcast after lunch today on the elevator, and hopped off with him on his floor to see the construction progress on the total digital-era rebuild of our TV & Radio broadcast studios. Most of the studio will be operational in three weeks, so I'll blog more then. Today I saw the smart glass windows that surround the control rooms (1). A push of an ordinary light switch in the room turns the floor-to-ceiling windows to milky translucent by electrifying a layer of LCD crystals sandwiched in between two layers of glass. The switch from analog to digital saw the ripping out of miles of old coax cable to be replaced by fiber optics. Racks of tape decks have been replaced by racks of data servers (2). The big control room is all touch screen LCDs in front of a giant Barco rear projection screen which offers total flexibility in showing multiple video sources (3). The new studio will be the envy of any James Bond villan.

- mike lee - washington, dc