“Broadcasting Needs to Party Like It’s 1999” writes Harry Jessell in TVNewsCheck. He ticks off the once-great broadcast conventions like the NATPE whose last year in Vegas was a shadow of its former self.

He looks forward to the 2010 NAB Convention in Las Vegas this April, and tells legacy broadcasters they need a good party, and laments how few station badges are at the shows these days. The comments are even more revealing. One wag says it should be renamed NANB, for National Association of Non-Broadcasters.

We’re now seeing the fruits of an organization that saw the handwriting on the wall long before its legacy members did, and was open and accepting of new media. I remember not long ago a broadcast industry that said non-linear editing would never work and a motion picture industry that said film would never die.

Legacy television broadcasters have nobody to blame but themselves. Like the RIAA and radio before them, they were in total denial about the changing media landscape. Instead of embracing digital technology, they cried poor and used their diminishing political influence to block its implementation.

So new delivery mediums simply built infrastructure without them, and now they’re on the outside looking in. YouTube is delivering 1080p while even legacy networks are still delivering content in SD.

We’ll be at the NAB this year, and while it might be fun to look at the big powerful transmitters, that’s not where the leading edge is, and the terrestrial folks ought to just accept it and move to the final stage of grief; acceptance.

Which I suppose is a good excuse for a party.

Arriving early at the IMAX for opening Thursday’s second show gave me half an hour in the theater to watch the patrons; everywhere was life imitating art. In the nearly 43 years since the franchise premiered on NBC at the start of the 1966 television season, the audience is almost an embodiment of the predictions in Gene Roddenberry’s mind when he first proposed the series nearly 50 years ago.

As we waited, we talked about our expectations with our communicators flipped open. We all had them. and they’re more full featured that the first predictive models. Some of us twittered and texted, others checked news. Still others watched video that had more inherent resolution in the palms of their hands than the original transmission of the first Star Trek episodes.

Video, which offered so little quality that 60s television was produced on film and converted to television at the last minute, has changed places with film. Today, if film is even used for acquisition, it is converted to video for special effects work, and then converted back to support the legacy projection systems that still use it.

More important (POTENTIAL SPOILER AHEAD) the plot requires of the audience an understanding of time-space concepts that Star Trek helped many of us to understand.

The intervening years have expanded our knowledge of these concepts and popularized them to a public beyond sci-fi fans.

The cell phone is boon to nearly everyone except scriptwriters. Its dealt a lethal blow to any script with an O. Henry twist that one party doesn’t know a fact that another party would instantly communicate, if only they had the means to.

You either need a bit of business to disable the cell phone, or recast it as a period piece. This is a problem Star Trek has always had to deal with.

By including characters that exist multiply because of space-time manipulation, today’s Star Trek writers have a rich new vein to mine for a franchise that started when I was a teenager but with this brilliant rebirth will almost certainly outlive me.

We’re not traveling space, but if we’d had the right administrations for the last three decades we well might be. I know that audience was ready. They’d already adopted everything they could get their hands on, and that’s driven life to imitate art in a most wonderful way.