Since TV engineers in the United States first began thinking about HDTV 25 years ago, CBS has been at the forefront of development and deployment.

The CBS O&Os are now joining the vanguard of stations that have begun offering local HD news. KYW Philadelphia made the leap earlier this month and KCBS Los Angeles and WBBM Chicago are next in line.

In this interview with TVNEWSDAY, CBS's VP of advanced technology, Bob Seidel, talks about the local HD rollout and how it's part of other plans for new facilities, microwave upgrades and the new generation of ENG camcorders.

An edited transcript follows:

Give us the overview of your local HD plans.

We've been taking a little different approach than most station groups in that we've decided that it's going to be more beneficial to convert the field news gathering operation before we actually convert the studio.

We're doing this for a few reasons. First, when you think about a newscast, a lot of the news that you see on the air comes from the field. There's usually an introduction in the studio and then you switch to the field.

The other reason is our DVC Pro [field] gear is now seven, eight, nine years old and is beginning to show wear and tear from being thrown in trunks and used pretty heavily. So we've been converting the stations to [Sony] XDCAM HD, which is the optical disc format. We've been rolling that out in all of the markets.

We wanted that to coincide with the Nextel conversion process. As you know, Nextel is buying all broadcasters new [microwave] radios in exchange for two channels of our ENG spectrum. By getting all new digital radios on somebody else's nickel makes it possible for us to convert the field fairly economically.

At the same time we're doing that, we're also trying to convert the studio operations in Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles.

The philosophy that we're taking in those locations is that we're building only high-definition facilities. These are totally new plants and new locations. There's no standard-definition control room or separate HD control room. There's just one master control and one studio control room—all HD from input to output.

So you are doing HD from the field in Philadelphia?

What has happened is Nextel has been slower than we would have liked in purchasing the radios. In fact, Nextel has applied to the FCC for an extension [of the September deadline] just because it's taking them longer to process all the paperwork.

So what's that mean? You can't do HD from the field at startup?

That's right. But we're still using the XDCAM HD gear because you can record in high definition and archive in high definition and then play back and get two different outputs. You can either get a standard-definition output or an HD output. This way, all of your archival material is in HD so if you record a story in the field and bring it back by hand, by shoe leather rather than microwaving it, then you can get the story on the air in HD.

So we might see a mix there? Stuff that has to be fed back by microwave will be 16-by-9 SD, but stuff that is carried back may be HD?

Yes. If Nextel had been on target with its exchange program, the plan would have worked very nicely.

When do the new facilities come on line in Los Angeles and Chicago?

L.A. is testing out its systems right now. As soon as they're happy with all the tests, they'll make the transition.

How about Chicago, where are they?

Chicago's in the construction phase. They're a little farther behind, but they're actively building and installing racks.

What's happening elsewhere?

We've also started rolling out XDCAM in small numbers in Baltimore, Miami and Denver. New York has had one or two units as well. They've been testing and shooting some material because there's a whole aspect here of training crews and getting them comfortable.

Now, the thing to remember in Denver is that Denver was delayed quite a bit because of the building and zoning controversy. It took literally an act of Congress and the President signing a bill to get the right to put up a tower, not just for us, but for all the broadcasters in Denver. They'll probably wait until they have the tower fully operational and at full power.

They haven't been broadcasting in HD out there?

They have, but, because of the building and zoning restrictions that had prohibited us from putting an additional tower on the mountain, they have been operating off a lower power transmitter in downtown Denver which doesn't have near the coverage of the mountaintop transmitter.

So you seem to be suggesting that Baltimore, Miami and Denver are next in line with HD news?

They are in various stages of planning or construction so they have not started some of the major studio renovations. The nice thing about [Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Chicago] is they're totally new facilities so you can start with a clean piece of paper. Some of the other locations are having to build in place. With the newsroom being on the air morning, noon and night, it's a little more difficult. It's a little more time consuming to build a new control room in parallel.

So you have active projects in those places as you begin introducing XDCAM?

I wouldn't say they're active projects. In some places, they're still planning. They're not at the point where they're buying equipment and installing. They're still figuring out how to do this parallel operation.

They might have to build a separate control room off to the side. In New York's case, they will have to actually build in the same control room just because there's limited space. That means a very delicate balancing act between not disrupting the on-air operation and getting the new equipment in.

So it's a lot more difficult to give hard dates when you're building a parallel facility. It's like changing a jet engine in midair. You've got to keep the plane on the air for four newscasts a day and update it in the process.

Would you say you could get all these stations online within the next 12 months? Is there any urgency at CBS to do that?

Oh, there is. It's just, again, we have to be cognizant that we can't disrupt the on-air operations.

Why did CBS choose to go with XDCAM rather than the Panasonic solid-state P2 or Grass Valley's Infinity?

With the Panasonic approach, the cost of the media, the physical memory cards, is very substantial. If you happen to lose one of those or if you forget to take it out of your shirt pocket and put it through the washer, that's a pretty expensive mistake.

Plus, you're fighting human nature in the sense that reporters love to hold on to their stories. They tend to hoard a lot of the raw material from stories that they've done in the field. You go into any reporter's office and there are just tons of tapes sitting around.

And in the end you have to archive this material in some form and a lot of people have said that optical storage is one of the cheapest ways to archive and so it will be going to optical disc storage anyway.

It may also help during this transitional period when you have to run material back to the station.

Right. It's also Blue-ray based. We felt we would also benefit from the consumer mass market, which will ultimately drive the cost of the media down as Blue-ray begins to accelerate its penetration.

According to the latest sales figures, it's already outselling its competition, HD DVD, like two or three to one, so we're essentially leveraging the consumer cost efficiencies in the broadcast side. The cost of media, we expect, will drop faster for the optical disks than it will for memory.

So the idea is to archive material on optical disks.

There are a number of jukeboxes coming out now that rather than using magnetic tape are using optical storage and that's very efficient. You can fit five or six optical disks in the same place that you can fit a digital tape.

What about DTV? Does CBS have any plan for using its extra DTV capacity for services other than HD?

We kind of think, in many cases, we don't have the extra capacity if we are going to preserve image quality. In fact, if you look at some of the recent AVS Forum comments, you'll see that people are beginning to perceive that stations that are doing multicasting are causing the quality of their HD to suffer.

Two things have been happening here. Consumers receivers are getting a lot better in terms of quality. You see receivers now coming out that can display the full two million picture elements. Before, a lot of the receivers like DLP were only half of that.

As a result, people are becoming a lot more critical in their viewing. Any imperfections become really obvious. If you were at the Consumer Electronics show, you saw 1080P was all the rage. That means that all those sets are going to have the full 1920 by 1080 resolution.

The other thing that a lot of stations have been confronted with is the fact that must carry only applies to primary video and that the secondary services may not being carried by cable or satellite.