One of the biggest station hardware deals of year was Fox’s decision to adopt Panasonic P2 format for newsgathering at all of its TV stations.

The man responsible for that decision is Andy Setos, president of engineering for the Fox Entertainment Group.

In this interview with TVNEWSDAY, Setos explains why he sees the move to the solid-state P2 as significant as the move from film to videotape three decades ago and why he believes it will open up a new world of efficiency and video creativity that may not be fully realized for years.

“This is not machinery,” he says. “These are palettes and brushes and colors you’re giving artists.”

Setos, whose broadcast responsibilities also include the Fox broadcast and cable networks, also addresses the future of satellite distribution, concerns about in-band mobile broadcasting and the fate of the broadcast flag.

There are many places we could start. Let’s start with network distribution. That’s a topic that doesn’t get very much attention anymore.

Oh, it gets plenty of attention from me.

I bet it does. It’s got to work all the time, right?

That’s right because, if it doesn’t work, I get called. I hate getting called; don’t you?

Is satellite still the best way to go for network distribution?

I would say quite comfortably that when you’re going point to multipoint—whether it’s a broadcast network with a couple hundred affiliates or a cable network with thousands—economically, there’s no competition to the satellite.

Even with all this fiber that’s been put in the ground.

Yes, even with all that.

I should also say on a point-to-point basis or when it’s 10 or 20 points, there is no question that fiber is the only answer. In fact, you can see how we operate. In terms of outbound, going to broadcast and cable affiliates, we use satellites and are happy for it. But when it comes to inbound, from news bureaus, news events, sporting events, we always use fiber. We’re the largest users of fiber for television in the country.

Do you anticipate any change in that basic scenario—satellite out, fiber in—in the next five or 10 years?

Five years, no. Ten years? I don’t hold my breath that long. I don’t know if there will be a third thing that will come along. Twelve years ago, I proposed doing football backhauls from the stadium to the network center on fiber. If it weren’t for the prescient guy named David Hill, who had faith in my judgment, we would still be doing it on satellite. The conventional wisdom was I was freaking crazy and we should do it on satellite forever.

You have done a major move this year, adopting Panasonic P2 across the board for HD ENG. Why P2?

Well, P2 does three separate things. Usually with an innovation, you get one thing out of it, right? But the marvel of P2 is you get three things simultaneously, all of which are quite exciting.

No. 1 is no moving parts. You can’t overemphasize the improvement in operational availability of product when you don’t suffer down time because some moving part isn’t moving anymore. In addition, there are no routine costs on moving parts. There is no changing of the oil. You know, there’s no wear, there are no drives, belts, tensions, nothing. So from a standpoint of reliability and cost, you’re way ahead of the game. That was the initial reason that we were excited about P2.

No. 2, there is the paradigm shift of going from media-based content to file-based content. Media-based content means you have something in your hand and it’s got a label that you’ve written on it. That’s your take, that’s your show, that’s your promo, that’s your thing that you’ve worked on and you keep. It has to be put someplace or physically copied. That’s what this industry has been working with since film.

Ultimately, it’s very bulky, it’s very cumbersome. It is very costly to distribute, to make physical copies, and requires a lot of labor. P2 allows us to think about pure file-based content, which means that the content is a file and can be moved around networks and transmission infrastructure in a faster than real-time fashion. It can appear simultaneously on multiple desktops. So, we have a tremendous improvement at work efficiency. That means better product, better output.

And what’s the third thing it does?

When we first embraced the technology when it was introduced four or five years ago, we realized that it was going to force us to take a step backwards in another area. It was SD technology when HD was beginning to be mainstream.

And so we were very concerned that this new technology and the feature set and all the related tools and the devices were being developed in the world of SD.

We went to Panasonic and we had a lot of discussions about this with them and they rose to the occasion. They produced a full-up HD version of P2 that’s backwards compatible, meaning any SD P2 content can flow through that system with capacities and times that are perfectly acceptable. So we have our cake and eat it too, one of those few times in life.

You were quoted as saying that the move to P2 “is a fundamental change, even more fundamental than moving from 16 mm film to electronic news coverage.” Isn’t that an overstatement?

No. The file-based work flow itself makes that true. We’re not going to realize the full benefit of that for a generation of people who work with news because this is so fundamentally different.

You know, my favorite scene in Broadcast News is when they finally cut that important piece. [Holly Hunter] is running down the hallway, bumping into people and almost impaling herself on a water cooler in a hallway and throwing the tape into a machine to get it on the air just in time. That is media-based content.

In file-based content it doesn’t work like that. Once the piece is cut, it pops up on some producer’s screen and it’s ready for air. Just click.     

The knock on P2 is that the P2 cards are very expensive.

Yeah, I hear that knock and it just shows that those people still think that you take the P2 cards out, put a label on them and put them in your drawer. They don’t understand that that is not what the purpose of the P2 card is. It’s not a replacement for media. The P2 is not media. The P2 is a transitory storage mechanism for content that’s a file.

It just shows that people haven’t figured it out. I would suggest that at the next NAB, if not at this IBC in September, it will be clear that everyone will be offering, or promising to offer, file- based content systems for all things.

How will the switch to file-based media change work flow, the way a news story from the field is produced?

As I said, it will take almost an entire generation of folks to realize all the benefits of file-based content. The moment you start to have file-based systems, you start to organically develop—how do we move this, what do we do with that, is that appropriate anymore?

It’s one step at a time. Once we have P2 devices in the field, we’re going to start to see where the next steps are. Are we going to stick with terrestrial microwave? Are we going to use cellular private channels? What mechanisms are we going to be using? Are we going to send browse quality back to the newsroom for news editors to evaluate and then have the broadcast-level content follow later? The browse content could be sent via DSL or Wi-Fi link because it’s highly compressed. So, there are all sorts of things.

I’m just sort of thinking out loud because I’m not accountable for how those people will operate. This is not machinery. These are palettes and brushes and colors you’re giving artists and they have to create with them. You can’t get in the way of that creation process. We want to aid the creation process. We don’t want to be overly engineering things.

So they’ll be creative and the work flow will actually evolve over some time.

Yes, I think it will be in steps. It will be smooth in the sense that there’ll be a trial and there’ll be a small roll-out, then a bigger roll-out. Everything gets introduced that way. Look how HDTV got started. I mean HD started arguably in the early 1970s out of NHK with a little 10-minute demonstration tape.

We need to be mindful of that fact that there is no magical switch and things do take time to proliferate.

Where do we stand with the broadcast flag? I know that was a big one with you.

Well, yes, it’s big with me in the sense that I co-invented it with my colleague Scott Hamilton. It’s an important thing for the broadcast industry. It’s been difficult to communicate clearly that it’s truly for the benefit of the broadcasters. Copyright holders will license their content only where it’s safe.

If broadcasters, especially the digital broadcasters of the future, can’t assure the copyright holder that they’ll do the most they can to keep their content safe from misuse and misappropriation, then content will naturally tend to not flow as freely to broadcasting.

So it’s truly in the interest of the broadcaster. We were thrilled that the FCC adopted it. Then, of course, it was overturned on a technicality. The court decided that the FCC did not have adequate jurisdiction to do that and needed Congress to pass legislation.

Unfortunately, it’s gotten tied up in a whole bunch of other agendas of the government. But we still hope to see it in law in the next 12 months.

I assume that you have been following the developments in in-band mobile broadcasting. Several systems are now vying to become the industry standard. Are you excited by the prospect of using a portion of the digital signal for mobile?

Our concern would be that the mobile system does not break digital television. We don’t want to do anything that screws up digital television, and we also don’t want it to preclude HD.

It would be tough to have a subscription [mobile] service during the weekend when Fox is doing all of its sports in HD. These systems couldn’t coexist with that type of broadcasting.

In addition, there are many, many other meddlesome issues that have to be resolved. So I would say, while we’re interested, we’re in the very early stages here.

But your chief concern would be that it not encroach on your HD?

I think it’s being mindful of the fact that there’s HD all over the place. We all think of it just as prime time, but it’s just as prolific in the daytime on weekends, not to mention there’re some soap operas and game shows.

So there’s tons of HD on now in many dayparts. One needs to be mindful of the fact that if the system that they’re proposing doesn’t coexist with HD, it’s a pretty stunted system.

What do you want to leave us with today?

One of the things that we’ve identified here is that SD equipment is no longer a wise investment. One way or another, everything that we’re buying is HD.

So HD is mainstream. Consumers probably realize that when they go to the store and they see only 16x9, large screen TVs at very affordable pricing and very high performance.

But it’s different on the professional side. There, HD is still hard. There’s still a lot of work to be done. You still see broadcast networks struggling with trying to get enough infrastructure and capacity to do more and more HD.

For instance, during NFL Sundays last season, Fox became the first broadcast network to offer advertisers HD availabilities in precisely the same slots as SD availabilities. That was extraordinarily difficult and it just shows how pioneering, in a way, the HD infrastructure is. We’re still the only place that you can get that.