Media General owns 23 stations covering nearly 10% of the nation's TV homes. Its markets range from No. 12 Tampa, Fla., to No. 179 Alexandria, La. All but one is a Big Three affiliate.

Responsible for keeping all those stations functioning properly and efficiently is Ardell Hill, senior vice president, broadcast operations.

In Part I of a two-part interview with TVNEWSDAY, Hill explains why Media General is suddenly jumping into local HD news, why he is already planning for HD field acquisition and why he believes Panasonic's P2 camcorder is the best tool for the job.

In Part II, which will appear next Thursday, Hill talks about Media General's system of centralized station monitoring and graphics production and the potential of in-band mobile video.

An edited transcript follows:

What was the big story at NAB this year?

The thing that struck me was the landscape shift from last year to this year. I thought it was quite dramatic. Last year, we all were talking about how [local] HD was going to happen and that it was just a matter of time.

This year, there was a groundswell for doing local HD now. It was pretty darn dramatic. It became a very big issue. I mean it was just throughout the floor. It was the predominant theme.

Media General has not been a local HD leader. Are you accelerating your local HD plans?

Absolutely. By year's end, Media General will have high definition on in at least four, if not five, markets. We will have it on in Tampa, Fla., at WFLA; in Spartanburg, S.C., at WSPA; in Roanoke, Va., at WSLS; and in Columbus, Ohio, at WCMH. There will likely be a fifth, but, because it may be the first in the market, I'd rather not identify the station right now.

Then, we're likely to bring another three to four markets online in 2008.

Why those four markets this year—Tampa, Spartanburg, Roanoke and Columbus?

We've reached a point where the differential in the cost of HD components has minimized. There's still a differential, but it's certainly minimized.

And technology is now allowing us to mix and mingle, allowing us to have hybrid plants that can manage both SD and HD signals simultaneously. So that's helping us transition at a more measured pace with the implementation of the equipment.

In these particular markets, we had equipment that needed to be replaced, and so as we're replacing that equipment, we're replacing it with high definition. And, in some cases, we're responding to competitive issues in the marketplace. Tampa, Fla., is the 12^th market in the country. All of our peers in that market are going high definition. So, you're not going to sit there with your competition doing it and just turn a cold shoulder and say, well, it doesn't make any difference.

Only a handful of stations are doing HD from the field. Do you have any idea when you'll get to the point where you can do HD from the field?

The cameras we bought this year, for example, are SD/HD. The cameras we'll be buying next year are SD/HD. The issues with HD from the field involve upgrading the infrastructure.

I've got to have a higher-end application running on the editing system. The HD files are much larger. My storage and archive for that content have to be larger. My microwave equipment and my ENG trucks have to be upgraded in order to make that HD path happen.

As I said, last year doing studio newscasts in high definition was just a matter of time and this year it is happening. I likely will be having this conversation with you next year saying, well, you know field HD all of a sudden happened.

That will be the next groundswell?

It's amazing to me how quickly consumers have come to see and realize the difference. I don't know what your own personal experience is, but, for most of the folks that I talk with, it goes from, well, it's kind of neat to they expect it. When they switch off a high-definition program and go back to a standard-definition program, they think there's something wrong with their TV.

During my interview with Cox Television's Andy Fisher a couple of weeks ago, he said that when he was young TV newscasts mixed color from the studio with black and white from the field and they got away with that for a number of years.

We feel the same way. The signals we're shooting in the field now with digital cameras have literally no loss from the image sensor to the storage device, through the editing process, to air.

As a result, when you upconvert a digital image captured in the 16-by-9 | More …