As the chief technologist for the Media General Broadcast Division, Ardell Hill is responsible for keeping 23 stations up and running with maximum efficiency.

Last Thursday, in Part I of this two-part interview with TVNEWSDAY, Hill explained 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.

Today, in Part II, Hill talks about the station group's system of centralized station monitoring and graphics production and the potential of in-band mobile video.

An edited transcript follows:

When we interviewed you last year at this time, Media General had just bought four more stations from NBC and you were talking about creating a central control hub for them. Where does that project stand?

We're done.

You're done. Where is it located?

I'm controlling nine NBC stations now out of Columbus, Ohio, and it's a mirror image of my operation in Spartanburg, S.C., which controls my 10 CBS affiliates.

The NBC stations were part of a full-blown centralcasting system. Did you have to go back and retrofit all those NBC stations with individual master controls?

Well, I had to buy hardware. I had to retrofit them, but I did not reconstruct a traditional master control environment. In our system, we store and manage content locally. The stations have an automation system so they can keep themselves on the air if they lose connectivity to the network.

All we're doing at the central site is monitoring and intervening when something happens. If there's local breaking news, if there's a local event, a local emergency, the station immediately takes control.

So I had to upgrade [the NBC stations] to a full-blown automation system. Each station had some storage in-house for backup programming and the like. I had to increase that server and channel capacity to the point where I could manage all my syndicated content, all my commercial content.

I had to buy some servers and I had to beef up the storage capability. The switching gear was still pretty much there, but just not being utilized. I either had to add or upgrade switching capabilities so that the equipment could be automated and controlled remotely.

I had to reinvest in those stations, but it was cheaper than maintaining the centralcasting model. My cost for a redundant centralcasting system would have probably been somewhere around $10,000 a month—$120,000 a year—just in transport costs.

Trust me, my connectivity costs between those properties is dramatically less.

That's interesting. That might be the first example of centralcasting stations being restored to full or near-full capability.

And I didn't add a huge staff to do that. I added some equipment, but I didn't drive up my operating costs.

You're also centralizing graphics. Tell me about that.

By the end of this year, we'll have implemented a central graphics operation. We're aggressively putting that package together now.

And it will cover all your stations.

Yes. All of them. Whether it's an over the shoulder, whether it's a lower third, whether it's a full screen with moving images and animations, whether it's charts or graphs or maps—all the graphical images for our shows—will be produced out of a central center. It will operate 24/7, 365 days a year.

Where is that going to be located?

It's going to be located here in Richmond, Va.

What kind of graphics systems are you going to be using?

The system we're deploying is an open architecture. We have a number of graphic platforms in the field, but it's predominantly the Leitch system and the HarrisHyperX system from Chyron. 

The work-flow management tool will likely be Miranda. My three key players are Chyron, Harris and Miranda and that they're all competing.

You're saying that they're competing.

I'm dealing with them in the context that I want an open architecture system. I don't have to be all Chyron, I don't have to be all Harris and I don't have to be all Miranda. They have to play with each other.

And it comes online when?

We hope to have it all of our stations transitioned to it by the end of the year.

You were an early adopter of Grass Valley's Ignite system. Has that thing lived up to its ROI claims?

Absolutely. It's like any other new technology. It has had its painful moments—in some cases, incredibly painful moments—but all in all, it's been no more challenging than any other new technology.

Grass has been committed to solving the problems, which have been largely software and application issues with regards to how Ignite talks to things like [AP's] ENPS, editing systems and Chyron systems.

As you know, everybody wants to send out a new software upgrade every time they make a slight improvement to their product. So when you've got a device that is controlling a lot of components, one little change can inject all kinds of havoc into that process.

But the systems are on the air, our newscasts are more consistent, the creativity has not been hampered and the efficiencies of the business models have been realized. We have reduced staff and taken advantage of the capabilities that the system provides us.

Other broadcasters are reluctant to adopt Infinity because they don't think it will be flexible enough when all hell breaks lose in the newsroom. Do you find that there's sufficient flexibility built into it?

Absolutely. Our first market to launch it in was Mobile, Ala. As you know, two years ago, Mobile was hammered with three major hurricane threats in a row culminating with Katrina.

At one point, we went 24/7 with wall-to-wall newscasts with no scripts, no planning and with a new crisis about every moment. Not only did the system perform and hold up, but we probably wouldn't have been able to do what we did were it not for that system. The system basically takes out of the equation the need to communicate to a large number of people.

How much flexibility you have is dependant on how you program it and how much flexibility you build in. But we learned some good lessons upfront about how to do that and we find that that is just not a problem. By the end of this year, I think I will have Ignite on the air in 11 markets.

And the idea would be to move that into the additional stations over time?

Absolutely.

OK. Let's talk about mobile video. When I saw you at NAB, you said you had seen both competing systems, Harris/LG and Samsung.

I did. Both were stunning in terms of their ability to deliver in-band content to portable devices. Obviously, we're still in a prototype configuration here so I didn't have a PDA to walk around with. But it's clear that it's a capability that we're going to have and one that is going to allow us to maximize reaching consumers with our signals where they want it.

As [Cox Television's] Andy Fisher said in his interview with you, we've been wireless forever. I don't know why wireless all of a sudden is such a phenomenon to folks. We've been wireless for the better part of 50 years.

Today's reality is the consumption of content by a person on the move, whether that's on a train or whether that's in a car or whether it's walking down a street.

How many times did you bump into somebody at the NAB who said "excuse me" because they had their eyeballs buried in a Blackberry?

How do you compare the two systems?

The biggest thing that struck me between the two is the Harris/LG system seems to be a little bit more spectrum efficient and these days we're all counting bits. There's no doubt about that. 

Several broadcasters announced they were part of a coalition to promote mobile video. You were not among them.

Jim [Zimmerman, president of the Media General Broadcast Division] hasn't had a chance to talk to the folks on the coalition yet. But I would see no reason that Media General would not come on board. We haven't gotten a formal presentation. I would say that everything we've seen and heard about it, we support.

Does Media General have a DTV plan beyond mobile or HD? Are you kicking around any other ideas?

We do not have a business meeting at which a major topic is not how we can utilize that spectrum. That's why we're excited about mobile. But we don't see mobile giving us many opportunities for three to five years. Until there are some device in the hands of the consumers, not much is going to happen.

But the demonstrations suggest that it will happen and so it gives us reason to start thinking about how we start creating content targeted to mobile and portable users. You don't do things like that over night.

So, do we have a master plan that we've gotten all written up somewhere? No. Is there anything that has been written, said, promoted or approached by others that we haven't considered? I certainly hope not. I think we look at every model and every opportunity that comes along. We challenge our folks to be creative and come up with ideas anywhere they can find them.

And because of this mobile talk, that's where you're focusing your thinking right now?

It's one of the components of our discussion. I wouldn't say we're focused on it.

Think about mobile today, what V Cast and what Qualcomm are doing now with their products. What are they delivering? They are delivering national content. They're delivering it to a subscriber-based model.

There are a number of folks who never want to be disconnected who are willing to pay $5 or $10 a month to be able to watch MSNBC or NBC or some other national service, which is what they're restricting it to.

But, you know, there's this wonderful thing about the business we're in. It's free, and, when the consumer doesn't have to pay $9.95 or $5.95, I tend to believe the universe of those watching on their cell phone or portable device will explode.

Sinclair's David Smith talks about mobile as a pay service, but Andy Fisher sees it more as an advertiser-supported extension of regular television. So, both options are on the table.

Absolutely. And I don't want to discount David's subscriber model because—I'll just try to dream one up here. Let's just say that I'm a broadcaster in New York and I can put out a Wall Street Journal-type service to people who are willing to subscribe for $1 a month. You know what? There might be a subscription model there that works.

But I may be able to scale that down to where it's takes as few of my bits as possible and still have a free model paired with the subscription model.

I don't know that there's any model right now that speaks louder than the others, but the fact of the matter is, when we're now talking about an umbrella signal over the whole marketplace where the consumer has the option of subscriber services and free services and services from multiple providers on a single devices, it's pretty powerful.