Kelly Alford is best known for having pioneered centralcasting at the Ackerley station group a decade ago—an accomplishment recognized with a Broadcasting & Cable Technology Leadership Award in 2002.

Centralcasting—operating master control of multiple stations from a central hub—hasn’t swept the industry, but such groups as NBC and LIN have implemented it, others have adopted variations and all have tinkered with it.

With Ackerley merged into Clear Channel Communications, Alford is now VP of engineering at Fisher Communications, a Seattle-based company with a growing TV footprint. It operates 12 full-power and seven low-power TV stations, affiliates of CBS, ABC and Univision.

In this interview with TVNEWSDAY, Alford talks about how he is bringing centralcasting and automated news production—another technology that he is adopted early on—to Fisher. He also reveals a preference for the Panasonic P2 HD camcorder format and speaks passionately about the need for broadcasters to sell over-the-air television during the DTV transition.

An edited transcript follows:

You caught my eye with a press release that said that with the help of integrator Advanced Broadcast Solutions you had upgraded your CBS affiliate in Boise, KBCI. Tell me about that.

As Mark [Siegel, president of ABS] said in the press release, KBCI is your typical small-market station in a growing market. Boise is very much a growing market. It’s really vibrant.

As we looked at the infrastructure there, we found they had very traditional work flows on the news production side, aging equipment that was on its last legs. With my history at Ackerley where I did 11 Parkervision systems, I had a pretty good idea of what we were facing and what the benefits were of switching from traditional work flow and the traditional infrastructure up to something like an Ignite system. So we opted to go in that direction.

One of the reason is that, in a lot of these small markets, it’s really hard to get and keep good technical personnel on the production side of things. You get them trained, they stay for a little while then they move on. Or, it’s just hard to get good ones to begin with and put together a quality newscast. So, we went in with new graphics and the [Grass Valley] Ignite system. The news product in Boise is now 180 degrees from where it used to be. It’s much better.

Other than the Ignite, what are the other pieces of the system?

It’s graphics. We put in a new Avid Deko system. We were already ENPS, but had to integrate that into the system. We have new lighting and, obviously, with Ignite comes new cameras, the way we handle our audio. I mean everything, soup to nuts—new 3D animations for our graphics. It was completely rebuilt.

What about the rest of the Fisher stations? Are they in line for soup-to-nuts upgrades?

We have some stations that are in very similar situations—smaller-market stations where the people expect high-quality newscasts and where we are hamstrung by limited technology.

I’m very familiar with Ignite, but Fisher was not. So, we are using Boise as sort of our first operation. They’ve been on it now for a few months and it seems to be working very well. We’re looking at the potential for using that at some of our other stations. We don’t have any on the calendar, but it’s certainly in our strategic look forward.

Then, we did a centralization of three of our stations in Eastern Washington. We did sort of a hybrid version of what I did with Ackerley. We’re looking at doing that again with another of our stations. I can’t tell you which one yet, but we are looking to move in that direction pretty much across the group.

You seem to have a lot of confidence in the Ignite, in automated news production.

It’s a huge shift from the traditional work flow. You’re still controlling a traditional production switcher. You just don’t have the big panel in front of you. You’re still running an audio mixer. It’s just run by a computer and all the elements are just triggered via a computer. That’s the real big difference.

Controlling all the elements is sort of like herding cats initially, but once you get everything set up and you get your shows built, it goes very well.

Part of the knock against going to an automated system like that is it can’t do breaking news. In fact, our experience has been quite the opposite. Breaking news is handled very quickly because you do not have to communicate the changes in the show—the commands—to several different people.

A director and a producer, which is all you really need in that kind of an environment, can make the changes almost instantly and roll to whatever the breaking news is. You can even program macros or hotkeys. So, if you’re going live to the field, you can simply press a key and it will roll the breaking intro, it will cue the talent, it will play the music, it will do all that. You just have to get all your macros set up.

Have you have had any trouble with the Ignite and its Parkervision predecessor?

It’s a really tough transition. One of the things we learned at Ackerley after we did one of the first ones in Bakersfield at KGET was that it always pays to have an integrator put the system together, test the system off line and train off line. It really speeds the time to air and reduces the amount of miscues on the air. It’s better than trying to save a buck or two, build it in-house and learn it on the job.

We had two problems in Boise. One of them did affect our newscasts and that was due to audio engine infant mortality, but other than that, we haven’t had any other issues and it’s been running fine.

You are considered the father of centralcasting, having put the Ackerley stations on hubs back in the mid-1990s.

Yeah, we’ve got three of our CBS stations—KIMA [Yakima, Wash.], KEPR [Pasco, Wash.] and KLEW [Lewiston, Idaho]—now running on a centralcast model. We call it Centralnet.

With centralcasting, there is always a question of how much programming is coming from the hub. How far are you going with this?

Probably 75 percent of the content all runs out of the network operating center in Seattle.

We run what I guess you could call a quasi-distributed model in that the majority of the content is being shipped out of Seattle—the standard-definition content, the commercials, the promos. The network pass-through is done at the station level by essentially just switching the local satellite receiver into their air chain. Of course they do their own local news, although when they roll their breaks the commercials are actually coming from Seattle.

What are your hubbing plans going forward?

We’re looking at one other station which, again, I can’t talk about right now. We’ve also purchased several Univision affiliates and we’re also running them out of our network operating center as well. Those are all being distributed via satellite however.

OK, so you’re talking about putting one more station on the Seattle hub, the same operations center. You’re not talking about building another hub somewhere.

The Fisher stations are all on the West Coast so it makes it much easier, with the cheaper connectivity, to have a single knock.

According to my records, you have one HD station, KOMO Seattle. Do you have plans to start up HD elsewhere?

We’re looking at the demand for it. It’s more difficult to justify in smaller markets. We’ve pretty much decided that as equipment needs to be replaced, especially cameras, to go ahead and get equipment that is at least HD capable. It’s not that much more. Then, if we decide that there’s a good business reason and that the public wants more HD content, we’ll be all set for it.

Well, it doesn’t sound like you’re getting close anywhere else.

No, not really. We recently went 6:9 at KETU, our station in Portland, Ore. And, to be fair, KOMO still doesn’t acquire HD in the field. We are planning on changing that. I think that’s the next step for us—going to field acquisition in HD at KOMO.

There are only a handful of stations doing field acquisition in HD.

KOMO and Fisher were early adopters and the cost of the equipment was fairly high then.

When did KOMO begin HD news?

Oh, gosh, way back in ’98 or ’99. KOMO was one of the first stations to have any HD content on the air, although there was nobody to watch it.

We’re talking local news ?

Yes. Now, granted, we have our fair share of upconversion going on, but our studio cameras are HD and have been for many years.

This may be a better question of the GM. Has HD been any help in the ratings?

No. I don’t believe so. In fact, I went to a Broadcasting & Cable symposium back in Orlando last year, and they had a couple of general managers on a panel discussing recent migration to HD news. They were asked if advertisers have been willing to pay more for HD content or if there been any ratings improvement since going HD. The answer was no. There really hasn’t been any.

Of course, it’s only been lately that you have significant penetration of HD sets.

“Significant penetration” is sort of an interesting term because I heard a statistic the other day from a consumer survey that said that right now, the HD-capable sets are running at about 40 percent of the market. But of that 40 percent, only half actually have true HD content.

Yeah, I heard that too and it’s just amazes me.

And the other interesting thing is the return rate on these kinds of sets is fairly high. In fact, it’s increasing. People purchase the sets, fairly expensive sets, and they don’t believe that the content looks any better than what they had before because they don’t understand that it isn’t HD content.

They think they are going to be able to explain the DTV transition to everybody over the next 16 months. I’m somewhat skeptical.

I wish I could sound the alarm bell for broadcasters. On the whole, broadcasters aren’t doing a very good job of educating our public in what to do. We’ve talked to our general managers about getting the word out more. I walked into a Best Buy the other day and they had, running on their TVs, a demo that was just a loop that talked about how, if you want to get high definition, you have to either contact your cable provider or your satellite provider. It never mentioned the potential for over-the-air reception, which is the purest HD you can get. So I think that broadcasters need to start doing some consumer education about getting true HD content from the stations.

Well, that’s a nice segue to my next question. Are your stations going to be able to make the transition to digital on Feb. 17, 2009?

Yes, they are. We spent a significant amount of capital over the last couple of years doing our build outs for all of our DTV transition. We have a couple of stations that will be migrating back to their upper VHF channels, but we’re all prepared for that.

When you were talking about KOMO in HD, you said your next step HD-wise will be to field acquisition at KOMO. Have you picked out your HD camcorders yet?

Right now, all of our cameras are [Sony] Betacam SX digital tape cameras, but the next step will be going to a file-based format, probably Panasonic P2, although we haven’t officially announced that yet. We like not having spinning media or tape and we also like the advantages in work flow that going to a file-based acquisition format gives us.

We’re also looking at doing a significant overhaul—probably next year—of the editing, play to air and media management side of things at KOMO, which will include beginning the migration to a file-based HD camera in the field.

And you’re leaning towards Panasonic right now.

Yeah. They’ve certainly got a head start in the RAM-based cameras.

I guess the other key to doing the HD field acquisition is being able to do those live shoots with digital microwave gear that Sprint Nextel is providing. Is Seattle close? Do you have any sense of when the new microwave equipment will be installed throughout the market?

We’ve been through the whole inventory process and our inventory in Seattle has been scrubbed, which means that we’ve essentially been blessed to move on to the next level and start shopping around and getting quotes.

But from what I’ve heard from the few markets that have actually made the transition, it hasn’t gone really very well. They’re rather disappointed in the performance of the digital radios in the news trucks. One of the other concerns that I have is how the digital radios work in a moving helicopter. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover here in the Pacific Northwest with our helicopters. I’m concerned about Doppler effects and what they would do to the digital signals. We really haven’t been able to prove whether it works yet or not.

I thought all the problems were with the paperwork and negotiations. I hadn’t heard of any field problems.

That this is a rather onerous transition for Sprint Nextel is finally starting to hit home now. Doing it in theory is one thing, but doing it in practice is quite another.

Are there any other tech issues that you would like to talk about? You’ve got a national platform.

I’d say my biggest concern is, as I’ve mentioned already, is that broadcasters need to make sure that the general public knows that there is an alternative to cable and satellite for receiving their HD signal.

It’s amazing how many people that are in their 20s have asked about receiving KOMO-HD over the air. We try to help them through the process. We find out where they live and send them to the local electronics retailer for the right antenna.

The interesting byproduct is that we have a friend for life. They’re very loyal to the station for helping them out. There’s a real opportunity here for broadcasters to step up and connect with the viewers and have them understand that they can receive HDTV for free.