My son Channing, who is four, "accidentally" poked in the eye my son Cole, who is two. When the tears were dry, Channing apologized and said, "It will feel better tomorrow."

"It's not tomorrow," Cole replied.

Nor is it "early summer," when I promised I'd start Season 2 of NerdTV, my online interview show. An explanation is in order for all those who have e-mailed me wondering, what's the delay?

Season 1 of NerdTV was a critical success, but a technical and financial failure. Viewers loved the shows but a corporate underwriter never emerged so we didn't have the money to fix all the technical problems that appeared as the season progressed. We were inventing a new medium as we went along and the fact that it required more bandwidth than all the thousands of pages at pbs.org put together didn't help. More than 2 million downloads later, we've learned a lot and so are determined to do Season 2 better.

Think about those 2 million downloads for a moment. At the end of last year Apple was crowing about having sold 8 million video downloads through iTunes, but most of the iTunes video inventory at that time was 2-3 minute music videos. NerdTV did more than 2 million HOURS, which may have been more than all of iTunes at that time.

But as always, Steve Jobs was paid and, as usual, I wasn't.

Preparing for Season 2 has allowed us to make a lot of technical improvements, but these improvements inevitably complicate production. During Season 1, for example, between the various audio and video and subtitled versions we had to produce 18 different media files for each individual show. That was just for MPEG-4. But now that we are planning to also offer the show in WM9, Flash, and H.264, the number of files will only increase. Where we solely distributed Season 1 in 320-by-240 resolution, now we'll be adding QCIF (176-by-144) for mobile phones as well as 640-by-480 and even 720p for those who want to watch the shows on their HDTVs. These changes take the required number of media files past 40 per episode and mean that we really need some automated workflow, which we never had before.

It was logical to move to HD for shooting the shows, but WHICH HD? Making this decision probably took the most time of all.

One important lesson learned in Season 1 was that the higher the quality of the original material the better our compressed files would look. This is where not all HD's are created equal. The consumer-grade HDV cameras, for example, use MPEG-2 compression internally to allow them to record on standard DV tape cassettes, but this degrades the picture somewhat. Another approach would be to move upscale a bit to DVCPRO HD, but that requires recording directly to a hard disk. Comparison tests with a variety of cameras definitely showed, however, that the DVCPRO HD was far superior, ESPECIALLY after compression.

If you want proof of this garbage-in-garbage-out axiom, just watch Apple's Mac-versus-PC commercials online. They look so good for two reasons: 1) the white backdrop dramatically lowers the visual complexity of the frames, allowing room for carrying more visual detail of the actors in the allotted bandwidth, and; 2) those commercials are shot on 35 millimeter FILM then scanned into Final Cut Pro at better than HD resolution. It's a lot of work but the effort shows.

So now we're settled on DVCPRO HD, but we still want to record at 24 frames per second, as we did for Season 1. Recording in Panasonic's 24p Advanced mode was the one technical risk from Season 1 that really paid off. By recording at 24 frames per second we eliminate 20 percent of the bandwidth that would have been required for 30 frames per second BEFORE going on to compression. The result isn't necessarily greater bandwidth savings, but better bandwidth UTILIZATION, allowing our 208 kbps video to look, frankly, pretty darned good--easily the equivalent of someone else's 300-400 kbps video. Another part of this better look is compressing for playback at the full 24 frames per second, thus avoiding that herky-jerky look of many Internet videos. If we want HD in 24p Advanced, there are really only two choices, both from Panasonic--the AG-HVX200 or the VariCam. We chose the AG-HVX200 for the simple reason that the VariCam costs almost 10 times more.

Moving to HD means we'll need more bandwidth for Season 2, not less, especially for those folks who want to watch full-frame, so we've had to provision even more bandwidth, a process that is, frankly, as yet incomplete. The decision here is a difficult one. Do we abandon direct downloads in favor of going strictly with BitTorrent or some other peer-to-peer system? Do we continue to run direct download and torrents in parallel? And where can we steal more servers? This is the last major question to be answered and the data is, frankly, contradictory. BitTorrent would be the way to go, based on bandwidth savings and overall utilization, except that more than half of our viewers don't have a torrent client installed. The jury is still out on that one.

Then there's that pesky part about money. How do we make NerdTV pay its way? It comes down to subscriptions, pay-per-view, advertising, or something from behind Door Number Three. As much as they love Doug Engelbart, many viewers made it clear that they saw no reason to pay for NerdTV content, which probably leaves us with advertising or Door Number Three. The problem with advertising in online video is that it has been limited to pre-roll and post-roll (just before and just after the show), which doesn't work to the advantage of shows like NerdTV that can be more than an hour long. This is the biggest single reason for YouTube's 100-megabyte limit on the size of submitted videos.

In time I'm sure we'll solve the financial problem and do not just this NerdTV show, but also many NerdTV shows of many kinds. It's a brand we'd all like to see grow and prosper.

So look for the new and improved NerdTV Season 2 not by the early summer, but definitely by late summer. We're working as fast as we can.

In other news, the Berkeley, California, City Council was about to rubber stamp last week a plan to build a municipal WiFi network, but someone at the hearing showed them my "If We Build It They Will Come" column about how we should own our own fiber last mile. Lo, the Council turned on a dime and on a five-to-one vote decided to study the fiber alternative. It was a smart idea. Berkeley, as a densely populated town, is ideal for this sort of project, which has already happened in places like Utah and Oregon.

A lot of experts have been getting blogging mileage from criticizing my "The Skype is Falling" column, pointing out the scalability problems with Skype and Skype-like VoIP telephone systems. They say I don't know what I am talking about. Maybe I'm just a bad writer. Alas, these folks don't seem to have read Skype's own documentation. So I'll revisit that topic next week to better explain my position and I'll reveal a new technical alternative that promises to change the VoIP landscape completely and maybe the entire Internet as well.

But that's next week and, as Cole says, "It's not next week."