Ira Goldstone is happy to see broadcasters working together to develop standards and business models for in-band mobile video through the Open Mobile Video Coalition.

And if Tribune’s chief technologist had his way, there would be more cooperation—at least on technical issues. It has been “truly lacking” in the industry, he says in this interview with TVNEWSDAY.

And Goldstone suggests other areas in which a little cooperation could go a long way: toward standards for exchanging filed-based programs, particularly HD programs, and in winning some flexibility from the FCC in the digital transition.

In the cooperative spirit, Goldstone also generously shares Tribune's experience with—and his current thinking about—centralization, local HD production, news acquisition and editing, news production automation and distribution transmission systems.

An edited transcript follows:

What’s on your mind these days?

One of the biggest issues facing us all right now is the whole issue of file-based content exchange. Pathfire has identified some standards for programming exchange, but even those are different from what its new owners have been doing.

Even though there are great tool kits out there across programming and across news, there is no absolute standard—do this, do that, do this, do that—that makes it easy.

The problem is growing as we go to HD. We are deploying a whole new suite of files. And in the HD world, it takes much more time to convert files because they’re more complex.

What kind of content exchange are you talking about?

Syndicators to stations or spots to stations. While we’ve been doing spots to stations for some time, we haven’t been doing a lot of HD spots. Also, news organizations like CNN to stations and exchanges among stations during pools and emergencies.

I’m looking for some recommended standards or a consensus on file exchange among content providers and content distributors, particularly targeted towards high definition.

Sounds like a good idea to me.

The problem is there’s no production work flow organization that can create the standard. I mean, SMPTE does a great job at developing standards, but it doesn’t focus on this type of thing. MSTV? It’s really a spectrum organization. It’s not really charged with this part of the process. At ATSC, again, it’s the over-the-air digital broadcast. It deals with it downstream.

What how about NAB on an ad hoc basis?

I proposed it to them. I remember the days of the NAB audio card, but that was a long time ago. We’ll see.

What kind of initiatives are you taking internally to keep the video flowing efficiently?

Internally, we continue to expand our file-based delivery network where we ingest programming and then we distribute the preparation of that programming across the group so that no one station has to prep all of the shows.

So you have a common ingest point?

No. We have the same system at each station for moving the files and the metadata of shows off the Pathfire server and into local storage. And each station in our group is assigned certain shows to prep. That prep data is then propagated out to all of our stations and updates our automation data bases.

How is the data propagated out to all the stations?

Over our wide area network. All Tribune stations are interconnected. E-mail, expense reporting, you name it, it all rides on that network.

So it’s not really centralization.

We’re sharing information. So that’s one piece of CDC, the central distribution center. Another piece is, if a program is delivered in a linear format via satellite or as a tape, it goes to our facility in Indianapolis and there we encode it and then send it to the other stations as a file over our satellite capacity on Galaxy 17. The prep assignments are done by the stations in the same way as the Pathfire shows are done.

And that’s all done out of WTTV in Indianapolis.

Right. By the way, also out of Indianapolis and in Seattle, too, we run certain stations remotely. The regional centers composite the entire master control feed and send it out to other stations for broadcast.

Define “composite.”

What I mean is that we take the programs, the spots, all the keying, the branding and everything and create a final program output.

How much of that are you doing?

We currently originate six stations out of Indianapolis, two of which are in Indianapolis and four of which are out of market. We run three out of Seattle, two of which are in the local market and one in a remote market.

Will we be seeing more of that sort of thing?

I think you’ll see some more of that as people look to operate more economically. We’re always looking at that, but we haven’t identified what stations or which will be next. It’s a cost-benefit analysis. What does it cost to do it locally? What are the advantages? Basically, you’re just trading in some labor costs and some capital costs for some telephone line connectivity costs.

Do you see any obstacles that would prevent any of your stations from making the switch to digital in February 2009?

We’ll be there in all of our markets, although there will certainly be issues in making that transition happen. There’ll be issues in getting antennas that are currently side mounted to be top mounted overnight. We’re going to need some flexibility to make it all happen. We’re going to be no different from any other broadcaster. It’s just you can’t do it at the flip of a switch overnight.

Well, I guess it was [Sinclair’s] Del Parks who was arguing for a grace period?

Right. And I think we would, too. In an ideal world, we would be able to have relaxed rules from maybe six months before the date to maybe a year after the date. So, in the six months before, you could reduce NTSC power and make some compromises in your coverage as you move cabinets around and repurpose them and do things to get ready.

You could use the year after to take a side mounted antenna and move it to the top of the tower. There’s an issue with what seasons of the year you can do it, when you can get an entire antenna tower crew out there. So it would be nice to be able to have a period of time that you could work all this out.

Do you think that that’s something that the FCC is likely to give you?

If it’s understood what I mean by grace period. It wasn’t that we leave our analog on after the cut-off date. It’s a time at which we may not be fully compliant with our digital signal.

But what you’re saying is that in that first year, you wouldn’t be broadcasting an optimal digital signal.

Nobody would be worse than they are today, but there are some cases where a side mounted antenna may be ultimately planned to be moved to the top of the tower.

But isn’t that a critical time in broadcasting when a lot of people will be trying to figure whether to stick with antennas or go to cable?

The answer for Tribune is that we’ve got very good [digital] coverage now and I don’t think it will make a significant difference. I think we’ve captured a lot of our digital audience so far.

Tribune was a charter member of the Open Mobile Video Coalition, which is working on in-band mobile video. What’s the potential there?

There are a lot of opportunities in mobile that we want to be a part of exploring. Something truly lacking in the broadcast industry has been people working together towards the same goals, the common interest. Everybody has had their own proprietary agenda.

Getting a mass of broadcasters in all markets to agree on some common standards, business plans and implementation schemes could really push mobile along and give the consumer a new set of options and allow some platform portability.

It sometime strikes me as too little, too late. There is already plenty of mobile video hitting the market and broadcasters have just begun working on a standard.

It depends on the model and I don’t know what the model is. Maybe we’re targeting the cell phone. Or, maybe we’re targeting the seven-inch screen in Mom’s soccer van. Maybe we’ll be an advertiser-based service instead of a subscription-based service. Maybe we’re just going to make our programming available across more receiving devices.

I don’t know any of these things. But we won’t know whether we’re too little, too late until we’ve figured out what it is we’re trying to accomplish.

Where do you stand with regard to local HD news production?

KTLA [Los Angles] is on the air today with HD in the studio. In the fall, we’ll have HD field acquisition on the air and by the first quarter of next year, we’ll be doing editing and everything in HD.

WGN [Chicago] and WPIX [New York] both have HD cameras already. Their control-room conversions are scheduled for later on this year so they’ll have HD studios by the end of this year. They’ll do HD acquisition there next year and editing the following year.

Now doesn’t the field acquisition depend on the Nextel microwave upgrade program?

Well, they’re two different pieces. First, there’s field acquisition—we’ve elected to go with Sony XDCAM for our acquisition—and then there’s live delivery and that’s tied with Nextel.

The Nextel program is way behind schedule. Where do you stand?

We’re already receiving equipment in a number of markets under that. Some markets are even done.

But all the gear is standard definition. So we’re also working with the vendors on price and delivery of the high-definition encoding equipment to enhance it. That will phase in over that same period of time.

By the time we have the editing online, we hope to have the high-definition encoding done too.

You’re a big XDCAM proponent. Why?

We’ve been a Sony operation for a long time so we have a lot of familiarity with their cameras and their current work flow.

We just didn’t find that the work flow of the [Panasonic] P2 card met our needs. It’s very handy on the editing side, but, on the acquisition side, we really needed low-cost media that a photographer or a reporter could take with them, take back to the station with no effort. That part of the legacy tape seemed to make sense to us.

We’ve worked with Sony on a lot of the enhancements that will be in the phase-three [two-thirds-inch CCD] product that is coming out later on this year.

Let’s talk about editing.

In the stations, we’re looking at two approaches. One is a big-station approach; the other is a small-station approach. In the big-station approach, we’re looking at the Grass Valley Aurora newsroom along with its proxy editing capabilities. In the smaller stations, we’re looking at the Gallery Sienna solutions, which are basically built on Final Cut Pro editors and Apple products.

Why the two-tier approach?

Gallery is a new player to the space. I think we want to try that in a smaller market first. They do scale very differently. In some of our smaller stations we have more background experience in Apple products. In bigger stations, the maintenance people and the technical people tend to be more PC based.

So we’re looking at both. There are applications for both. But, at the end of the day, we’re going to have a standard for transferring files, which is how you and I started this interview. So, at Tribune, whether you did it on the Sienna system or whether you did it on the Grass system, the files will flow between the two.

How about editing in the field?

It’s [Grass Valley] Edius versus Final Cut Pro. We’re still evaluating both.

Are you part of this news production automation trend?

Yeah. We have two Ignite projects going on right now, one in Sacramento, which is an upgrade of their existing newsroom, and the other is in New Orleans, where we’re building a new facility.

How’s it going?

Well, let’s just say it’s a little bit rougher than we expected. We’ve had to move the date on Sacramento for some software debugging.

When do you expect to bring them online now?

I can state the original goal. They were both to be on the air by the end of August, but maybe not.

We’ll see how that goes. 

I think we see a lot of power in it. We see a lot of value in it. We think it’s the right decision long-term. I don’t think we were prepared for problems because it had been deployed in so many stations already.

Is there any other interesting technology or issues out there you want to talk about?

The only other thing that we haven’t touched on, which ties into mobile, is the distributed transmission system. We think there are some good applications and we’re part of the New York Metropolitan Alliance that has been testing it. The improvement in equalizer performance on the receivers gives us some great opportunities to expand our DTV coverage—to reach places we can’t quite cover with an over-the-air big stick.

Other than that, we’re working with vendors on new solutions for news trucks, managing the SD-HD transition phase. Again, the Nextel equipment is great, but you’ve got a mixture of SD and HD equipment on the truck. So how does that all go together and how does that go with the nonlinear editors?

There are lots of cool bits and pieces and parts. Talk to me in six months and I’ll let you know how it all glued together.