MEDIA GENERAL GETS THE LOCAL HD BUG

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 SD format to a high-definition image, the average individual would be hard pressed to detect the differences between that image and a high-definition image. The image quality is very striking. That's what Andy was speaking to. The images we're capturing in the field these days are just striking.

But before you were saying that people do notice the difference between HD and SD.

I'm saying it will be hard for them to notice my upconverted digital SD signal from the field. I think people do recognize that there's a difference between standard def and high def, but the upconverted SD image looks very, very good, very crisp, very sharp.

How big an obstacle is the fact that you don't have the new ENG microwave radios installed yet?

That's a significant piece of it. If I can feed the standard-definition signal back to the studio, I can upconvert it. I haven't changed the bandwidth of my transceiver and receiver and my link back to the station.

But if I'm going to feed a high-definition signal from the remote, I have to have the full bandwidth capacity of that transmitter at the truck, the receiver at the tower and the transmitter at the tower.

And even with the [Sprint Nextel] BAS relocation program, they're not going to pay to upgrade me to high definition. So many of us are taking an approach where we may be paying a $200 premium to get a better radio that will do high definition.

That must really complicate the deal.

It does complicate a lot of things. In some cases, it is so complicated that it doesn't make sense because we're all very nervous about the BAS relocation and how far behind that program is already. We don't want to throw any more curves that might slow it down.

You've been buying Panasonic P2 camcorders for SD. Can I assume you will continue buying them as you move into HD?

Yes, absolutely, absolutely.

Why P2? Why not Sony XDCAM? Why not Grass Valley's Infinity?

One of the important parts of the transition to digital acquisition is work flow. Take out of the equation for a moment the quality of camera A versus camera B. Take out for a moment whether I'm storing it on device A, B or C. It really does not matter a great deal where it's stored. What matters is, once I've captured that image, how quickly can I move that content into the work flow.

And the challenge I've seen from day one with the concept of our good friends at Sony is that their system has just traded a videotape for an optical disc. Yes, I gain quality, and, yes, and I gain all of the things that I can do with the digital file.

But, in fact, I now have that content stored on a piece of media. In order to get the content off of that media, I've got to spin the disc. I've got to transfer it off of that disc to get it onto my editing platform and to be able to share it.

But as a data file, that P2 card mounts as a data drive into the system. As soon as I plug it in, I'm going to access it. I don't have to transfer it. I'm not waiting on the bottleneck.

Sony proponents also say the cards are so expensive you don't want to ever take them out of the camera.

It's not true. I'll just give you some numbers. We've got nearly 200 P2 cameras in the field. Each camera has two sets of cards, which means there are 2,000 P2 cards in the field. Those cards range in size from a  2 gig card all the way up to an 8 gig card.

With over 2,000 cards in the field to date, I have had three cards disappear, lost, can't find them. I've had two cards that were damaged. Somebody dropped them, stepped on them or ran over them.

As we started into this process, the big criticism of P2 was that it didn't have enough storage in the camera to be able to capture everything you need. Well, the reality is that my photographers rarely use the second set of cards.

Most of them never fill the camera with five 8-gig cards. Most of the time there are a couple of 8s, one or two 4s and one or two 2s. The camera has the ability to manage the clips within the camera. By simply moving an icon, by pushing a button on the side of the camera, the photographers can move the files onto a single card, pop a card out and hand it to a reporter. The reporter can then pop it into a laptop and transfer the files very quickly and hand the card back to the photographer.

And out of that quantity of cards, with nothing larger than an 8-gig card, I've never had a reporter or photographer complain of a lost story as a result of a failure of a card, never had anyone complain that he couldn't get the story done because he didn't have enough storage on the cards. That includes sports, football games, press conferences, you name it.

I've never had anyone come back and say to me that this process is flawed in any way.

The guys in the field have learned the tricks of the trade. They can line those clips up and pretty much spew out an edited story that only needs to be trimmed and cleaned just a bit to have it go to air.

You're talking about doing that inside the camera?

Inside the camera. So, without sounding like too much of a Panasonic salesman here, the differences between the work flow management of the Panasonic format versus the format of Sony are dramatic.

The Sony proponents also like the idea that reporters can take their stories with them on the discs as they now do with tape.

I respectfully see a different side of it. We loaded DVD record decks in our reporters' machines and in our laptops. Reporters can plug the card into the PCMCIA slot or plug a USB or firewire cable into the camera and transfer it to a standard DVD. A standard DVD holds about 4.7 gigs and costs about 50 cents. A [Sony] Blueray disc, granted, will hold about 15 to 20 gigs, but it probably cost $10 in the quantities that broadcasters are buying them. There's a large difference between 50 cents and $10.

Now, I can go to a typical Comp USA and I can buy a terabyte of storage for about $600. A reporter can throw a terabyte storage device on his home PC and store all of the video that he'll shoot almost in his entire career on that one device. If he wants to back it up, he can buy a second one.