If you’re old enough to remember the last Ice Age (like me), you probably recall the first commercial television sets, the ones with the ugly little brown picture tubes and the uglier rabbit ears that never quite worked (and still don’t). Fact is, the medium dates all the way to 1928 and featured a batch of primordial two-inch screens. TV would surface in earnest in 1948, and even then, the technology was pretty terrible. Pretty terrible, that is, by today’s standards. Sixty years’ lessons apparently weren’t lost on a fraternity of professionals who’ve routinely taken TV reproduction to modern levels–and one of them wants you to know that some Downtown attractions figure into the latest wave of digitized culture and the public’s perception of it. Ron Marcus is chief executive officer of Shindy Media, a Sorrento Valley production company that seeks to “brand” a client’s marketing potential the same way the high rollers do for movies and TV, with their hooks and angles and stories and such. New Year’s eve at The W hotel; a premiere Anthology concert; the doings at East Village’s Basic Kitchen & Bar: Downtown’s key attractions are integral to the company’s shindy.tv, founded in 2007 with a digital perspective to boot. “A cold beer never looked so good” in a shindy.tv clip featuring Ron Lynch, president of the Tilted Kilt franchises (San Diego has one Downtown). Hard to tell if Lynch was talking about the real thing or the one on the screen. “Our overarching mission,” Marcus said, “is to show off all of San Diego eventually. But there’s so much happening Downtown, and Downtown is growing so much, that [shindy.tv is] just a natural place to show all this growth. It just made sense to have a focus down there.” And theoretically, the recession gives Marcus a chance to bide his time and perfect his ideas. “People will be looking for places to go out [when things turn around],” Marcus said, “and those brave souls opening places right now, those are the places that people don’t know about yet. They’ll want to go to a place like shindy.tv to find out about them.” The “shows” about the hot spots are one thing—but Marcus said that the support for these items lies in electronic advertising support. “I haven’t been able to make that happen yet,” he explained, “and I don’t know what it’ll take to make that happen. I’m employing other models as well to where Shindy becomes a portal to culture in San Diego. I’m still trying to figure out the [ideal] model for that.” Even so, Marcus said, “I try to encourage people to be ahead of the curve by putting Hollywood-style video on [their] website, which will get [them] ahead of everybody in [their] market. Make the entertainment be a product itself, and that will attract more people to your own product.” But this is now, and that is then—like in the next few years, when Internet users may face wholesale glitches as bandwidth, or the rate of data transfer, theoretically evaporates. Cyberspace capacity is finite, and experts say it could run out sometime in 2010 amid demand that already increases 60 percent a year. The problem is compounded by the bandwidth requirements of giants like youtube and myspace. Marcus doesn’t seem fazed. “It’s amazing that we have the bandwidth that we do,” he continued, “and every 18 months, we double the capacity of everything. And I?think it’s going to be quite a long time before the entire world gets hooked up to broadband.” Meanwhile, a wonderful medium is taking root, and unlike in 1928, a global depression doesn’t seem terribly likely to unearth it. “The costs of production have come way down,” Marcus said. “Anyone, including myself, can buy a decent professional camera, and you can call yourself a video producer. But what I’m trying to do is bring a different level of creative thinking to corporate application. I’m thinking more like an entertainer.”