THE HUNT FOR TECHNICAL EFFICIENCY

ABC wants to keep its 10 owned-and-operated stations as independent as possible, figuring it’s the best way to ensure the stations stay in touch with local viewers and advertisers.

But that doesn’t mean the group can’t centralize some of the common technical chores, says group VP of Engineering Dave Converse.

In fact, he says, he is actively looking for ways of centralizing the handling of syndicated programming and commercials so that multiple stations are not ingesting the same shows and same spots.

In this interview with TVNEWSDAY, Converse also talks about HD news, ENG formats, news production automation, multicasting, mobile video and the digital transition.

And edited transcript follows:

ABC has been a leader in HD news. I know that you are on the air with it in the New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Fresno. What’s next?

I think that Houston and [Raleigh-]Durham should happen in the next year and then Flint and Toledo.

And this is all studio HD only. What are your plans for HD from the field?

After we get Flint and Toledo on, we will be addressing our field acquisition.

We do have wide-screen acquisition capability now in all of our markets. We’re pretty impressed with the wide-screen upconverted ENG contribution. It looks pretty good.

In doing HD from the field, you’re limited because of the microwave. For live shots and that sort of thing, there’s not a whole lot of that going on.

So you don’t feel competitive pressure to go HD from the field?

We’re sensitive to competitive pressure, but it’s real hard to get reliable measurements of what the impact might be. Everything is really done by word of mouth, feedback, that kind of thing, as opposed to something that’s measurable.

Nielsen doesn’t measure HD yet, although they’re about to. Every time someone turns on an HD newscast, they’re expecting to see a bounce in the numbers, which, as far as I know, has never happened

Not to cast any negative spin on all the efforts of all those people who have come before us, but it’s only recently that there has been enough of an interest in the consumer marketplace for HD programming.

For an earlier story, you told me you expect to make a decision on an HD ENG format within the year. It sounds like that will be concurrent with the move to HD field acquisition.

I don’t know that we’ll be done with the station roll-outs before we pick a standard, but we’re at a point right now where there’s only one ENG choice and we prefer to pick a standard when there’s more than one thing to pick.

What do you mean there’s only one ENG choice?

Well, we use the 720P format and there’s only one product that’s available today—Panasonic P2. Sony is just getting to the point of being able to deliver something [in 720P] as we speak.

So if Sony wants you as a customer, it’s going to have to come up with that pretty soon. What are you looking for in an ENG format other than 720P?

Something that doesn’t seriously change the success of our current workflows.

But don’t you want a format that will allow you to streamline the work flow, to make it more efficient?

Exactly. I want to make it better, not worse. I’m not trying to take potshots at anyone, but one of the problems that we had with Pathfinder’s original business model was that it was forcing us to dub everything to tape and then move it into our workflow. That just added a step to our workflow.

You just told me that you’re still entertaining Sony, yet that format preserves the step of ingesting the video.

But if I can get it off of that disc as a file as opposed to having to take it to baseband and recreating a file after that, that’s an improvement. That’s what I’m talking about.

But doesn’t P2 have an advantage in that you don’t have to wait to spin the disc and ingest the video.

Quite honestly, that is a fairly insignificant issue. I’m more concerned about the cost of the media.

And you want to preserve the ability of people to take away the medium, to carry it with them?

I don’t necessarily want to preserve that, but it’s human nature to say, 'this is part of what’s been referred to as my audition reel material.' They like the concept of holding onto it, not understanding that they can make a pristine copy of it and have it literally on a thumb drive or something of that ilk that they own, and not something that the company paid for.

As you said before, one of the keys to HD field acquisition is upgrading the microwave facilities and that depends on the Sprint Nextel program. As part of its spectrum deal with the FCC, it’s suppose to be supplying you with new digital gear and money to install it. Where does that all stand?

We are finishing up the last of our inventories and nearly 90% of our FRAs [frequency relocation agreements] are done. We have one station where the inventory is a little bit behind.

I know we’re already receiving equipment in a lot of our markets where we were able to get the FRA done earlier and we expect to be holding equipment in our hot little hands by the September obligation date.

Whether or not it will all be installed and the markets will be ready to deal with it I don’t know, but at least our stations should be in a position to not be impacted by any decisions or allocations that would put new users on that spectrum after Sept 7.               

You can’t switch to the new system until everybody in the market is ready, right?

Until everyone else in the market is either ready to do it or the FCC says that part of the spectrum is no longer available to you, please stop using it.

So do you think there’s a good possibility the FCC may take a hard line on this?

It depends on who the new users of the spectrum are and whether or not they have made a case that they need that spectrum more than we do.

As part of your drive for automation and more efficiency, you’ve adopted Grass Valley Ignite for news production. How is that going?

We have Ignite in KABC and KGO doing all of our news production. In SanFrancisco, we also use it for a five-day-a-week program called View of The Bay, a kind of afternoon talk show.

So we’re pretty satisfied with our efforts with the Ignite product and the learning that we and Grass Valley went through in developing that product.

You’re going to see it installed in Chicago and Philly and WABC over the next year or so. It’s being installed right now in Durham. I’m not sure where the timeline is for KTRK, but I know that that’s on the horizon there as well.

Now isn’t this the kind of thing that causes a rub with the unions?

It was in the past a topic, and, to some extent, it’s still kind of a sore spot. We ran into a jurisdictional issue. One union typically had the technical director with jurisdiction over switching video, except for when it was being done by a computer system, and then we had another union that had jurisdiction over making decisions about the camera positioning, the camera shots and the timing of elements.

What about centralizing your operations?

We’re looking at consolidated ingest functionality, monitoring programming content and looking at how we can we help monitor automation systems and that sort of thing, especially in the multicast world.

At seven of our 10 stations, we have Oprah, so that means that, at seven of our 10 stations, there’s someone recording that syndicated show, carving it up and preparing it for playback and then playing back all of the segments.

The state of automation today is such that if one person did it for all seven stations, there would be that efficiency earned.

And we could use that same model not only for the common programs across the group, but also for the common commercials. That’s not a huge number; it’s something in the 30% to 40% range. That saves effort because you don’t have to have a dubbing effort across each one of the properties.

Those are the sorts of efficiencies we’re looking at—the ability to monitor across the group, to look at things at a file level using a piece of software that can measure something more accurately and faster than 10 people sitting in 10 master control rooms across the group.

You don’t have a multicast plan right now, do you?

Actually, we do. We have three program streams on our digital channels. In addition to the HD simulcast, we have a D2 channel, which is mostly repurposed news and infotainment kind of programs—you know, replays of World News Tonight,  20/20 and local news.

Then, we have an Accu Weather channel which is a kind of like a headline news service, but right now it’s focused on weather. We’re looking at what we might do to modify that, to put more content other than weather in it.

By virtue of the fact that you’re doing 720P HD, you have a few more bits to work with. What about mobile? That seems to have captured everybody’s imagination.

Now we are taking a look at it. We haven’t, quite honestly, been involved with the [Open Mobile Video] Coalition.

We’re still trying to get all in the same room at the same time to have a conversation. That being said, we know the players at Harris and LG and, outside of the coalition, we have been having conversations with them about our interests and support of the concept.

My perception is that the management of the ABC stations is unusually decentralized and that the stations operate independently.

That is absolutely the case and that’s predicated on our belief that the television station operations are serving local communities and need to be managed based on the sensibilities and the needs experienced in that local marketplace.

And so wouldn’t the centralized control of the technical operations affect that?

We’re trying to create that in such a way that the local marketing and operation of the core business would still be a local operation run and managed by each one of the local stations teams.

Any obstacles between now and February 2009 for the ABC stations?

Although we have some unanswered questions, I think that we are in a position to meet our obligation to be ready to turn off the analog operations.

Some of the stations won’t be ready until the last minute, but most actually will be ready comfortably ahead of the transition time, and, when I say comfortably, I mean we won’t be struggling at the very last hours to be ready to switch over.

We’ve reached an agreement with Harris to supply the new and modified equipment that we’re going to need. We have just about wrapped up all but one of the antenna questions that we have to deal with. So, I mean we’re confident that we’re not going to be confronted with a last minute obstacle.

Is it hard getting crews for the tower work?

We’ll know that better as we get closer to it. We think that we have obligated all the appropriate people because, quite honestly, we don’t know if we’re going to be confronted with a crewing situation where it’s going to be difficult for them to work at the last minute.