INDUSTRY SPLITS ALONG SONY-PANASONIC LINE

Add Dispatch Broadcast Group to the Panasonic column.

The Columbus, Ohio-based TV group is going with the Panasonic P2 solid-state ENG system for HD news at its two TV stations—WTHR Indianapolis and WBNS Columbus—as well as its Ohio State Network and Washington news bureau, according to Panasonic VP Tom Moore

The deal includes nearly 60 camcorders along with field recorder/players and other related gear, Moore said.

Citing company policy, Dispatch group engineer Marvin Born declined to comment.

The Dispatch deal may not be the biggest that Panasonic has made for its tapeless HD format, but every one counts in its running battle with Sony for supremacy in the lucrative TV station market as more and more broadcasters gear up for local HD news—from the studio and from the field.

And, as every marketer knows, each deal helps beget the next.

The upcoming year will be crucial in determining which of the longtime rivals captures the largest share of the market.

Still hoping to make it a three-way contest is Grass Valley, but its Infinity system has been late to market. So far, it has announced no deals.

Among the station groups committed to the Sony XDCAM system are CBS, Tribune, Hearst-Argyle, Belo, Allbritton and Pappas. (Sony has also landed the biggest non-broadcast ENG customer in the U.S., CNN.)

In addition to Dispatch, Panasonic counts Fox, Cox Television, Raycom, Media General and Sinclair.

Most of the business is still up for grabs, notably the ABC and NBC O&Os and such mid-size groups as Clear Channel and Meredith.

The Panasonic and Sony tapeless formats are designed to stand up better to the rigors of news gathering and mesh more smoothly with increasingly popular file-based workflow systems than their tape-based predecessors.

But the two systems have fundamentally different recording media. The Panasonic P2 relies on solid-state PCMCIA memory cards, while the Sony XDCAM uses optical discs similar to the consumer Blu-Ray disc.

Prices of station-grade P2 or XDCAM camcorders (the Panasonic AJ-HPX2000 and Sony PDW-F350) are comparable, between $25,000 and $30,000 each.

Perhaps hedging its bets, Sony showed at NAB this year an XDCAM with off-the-shelf ExpressCard flash memory in place of the optical disc.

Fans of the Panasonic format tend to cite the facts that its solid-state recording medium has no moving parts and that video can be instantly unloaded and accessed by popping out one of the memory cards and inserting it into a player.

Panasonic detractors say the proprietary memory cards are way too expensive. Each 8 GB card lists for $700 and the AJ-HPX2000 holds up to five of them.

Those aligned with Sony claim the optical disc is just as rugged as the P2 card and that photographers, producers and reporters can handle discs just as they do tapes without having to worry about losing them.

The discs are also a good archiving medium, some say.

Tribune's Ira Goldstone said the Chicago-based station group took a hard look at the Sony, Panasonic and Grass Valley systems and found they all had their pros and cons, but settled on Sony because the optical disc better fit the workflow at the Tribune stations.

"We liked the concept of being able to walk away with the content in your hand," he said. "And it doesn't cost me a lot of money if a reporter loses it in a drawer."

CBS's Bob Seidel made the same point in an interview with TVNEWSDAY last month.

"If you happen to lose one of those [P2 cards] or if you forget to take it out of your shirt pocket and put it through the washer, that's a pretty expensive mistake," he said.

"Plus, you're fighting human nature in the sense that reporters love to hold on to their stories,"� he said.

"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.

But for Del Parks of Sinclair, P2 is the economical choice because Sinclair simply won't allow reporters to walk off with the P2 cards. "The cards are not consumable," he said. They're a capital item."

At Sinclair, photographers are now given a limited number of tapes and are expected to hang on to them and use them over and over again, Parks said. The same policy will apply after the move to P2, he said.

�I would never ever knock Sony,"� Parks said. "However, for us and our workflow, P2 fits better than Sony."

Media General's Ardell Hill gave a strong endorsement of P2 in an interview earlier this month with TVNEWSDAY. Among other things, he said that Clear Channel has learned to successfully manage the P2 cards.

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

Other broadcasters are still weighing the attributes of the competing systems.

The ABC O&Os use the Sony tape formats now, but, according to technology chief Dave Converse, the group is keeping an open mind.

"We are concerned about what the cost of [the P2] solid-state would be," Converse said. "That's our hesitancy.

"From a workflow standpoint, it looks like it's actually pretty promising. But the culture we live in where people will put what they shoot in their pocket and carry it around makes that kind of solution pretty expensive."

Converse said he expects ABC to make a decision on a next-generation format within a year.

Joe Snelson at Meredith says that group isn't ready to make the call, but he is leaning toward Panasonic.

"First of all, I like not having mechanics in cameras as much as possible," he said. "And we have a lot of Panasonic in the group already. It continues to work and function. I would just as soon stick with them."

Mike DeClue of Clear Channel Television is spending a lot of time thinking about a new format as he prepares a five-year technology plan for Providence Equity Partners, the private equity fund that is buying the group.            

Clear Channel has about two dozen P2 SD cameras in the field today, but that fact doesn't mean that Panasonic has a lock on the HD business going forward. "Sony is still in the running here,"� he said.

DeClue said that he likes the idea of solid-state recording media because it can be quickly ingested into a system where it becomes immediately available to everyone and because it has fewer moving parts. "I just as soon would like not have that spinning whatever it is."

But DeClue also said that he understands why some broadcasters like the optical discs.

"The more traditional people want a piece of media in their hand,"� he said. "That reveals a great deal about the way that they think."

Sony has helped its cause at Clear Channel by developing a camcorder that uses the ExpressCard, DeClue said. "It's the next generation. It's consumer-based memory."