Even if broadcast becomes all MVPDs and internet—and we never use those big-power, tall towers again—they still hold high value for society. For broadcasters, they are either an expensive burden or a big opportunity.

For a century, we have enjoyed a social contract where we entertain and inform, especially in crisis, for anyone and everyone who has access to a receiver; in return for spectrum and the authorization to monetize it. How this works and the technology underpinning it has transformed in a thousand ways. Once, transmitters and a channel number were foundational. Today, few would notice if OTA vanished. This is not an existential crisis. However, it is disruptive. Done well, it will be very good in many ways.

If there were no other reasons for a next generation of broadcasting, Emergency Mass Communications would be more than enough. ATSC’s 3.0 Advanced Emergency Alerting and Informing (AEI) would cement OTA broadcasting’s relevance. Further, there is a good argument that AEI could reinvigorate NextGen development.

Further, as we have become exceedingly dependent on GPS, the world has been searching for a backup. Broadcast Positioning System (an alternative that could supplement GPS in case of failure) is doubtless the best of the alternatives.

Everything we might do with our transmitters depends on the number of receivers. Expanding our reach into phones, home routers/gateways, cars, etc. is far more imperative than TVs. Metcalfe’s law states that “the financial value or influence of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system.” Today, broadcasters should be more motivated to “put 3.0 chips” in devices than attracting eyeballs.

If we want to keep our transmitters and spectrum—and there is no technical reason we can’t survive with only MVPDs and streaming—we should be steering to a favorable recasting of the social contract and infrastructure.

The idea that the wireless cell network is reliable enough for Emergency Mass Communications is absurd. The fragile wireless network collapses in any modest emergency. Even on a very bad day, scraped Earth incident, there has always—each and every time—been broadcast signals continuously relaying critical information. WEA and the wireless network is literally the fire extinguisher that doesn’t work in the presence of smoke.

No one is happy with EAS or WEA. AEI/BPS is the opportunity to bring Emergency Mass Communications in line with current technology and expectations, all the while increasing our relevance and reach. There isn’t a broadcast newsroom that doesn’t crave being the universal gateway to critical information.

Both BPS and basic AEI signaling are easy lifts that consume trivial spectrum. To us, this is nothing. To the world, this is huge. If we do our part and the FCC/FEMA pursues AEI/BPS we become more relevant.

With little drama, we should open the door to put ATSC 3.0 in more devices. It is that rare win-win all around.

Fred Baumgartner is a retired broadcast engineer. He once took time off to develop and promote EAS.

Mark Richer Why move to ATSC 3.0? There are many answers to that question, and the hundreds of people who attended the annual ATSC Broadcast Television Conference and ATSC 3.0 Boot Camp earlier this month came away with new insights about how broadcasters will reach tomorrow’s audience hungry for local news, emergency alerts, favorite shows, and a seamless experience that merges broadcasting with the Internet.

Indeed, the move to an IP-based TV broadcast system is a foundation for the future of television.

Quite simply, ATSC 3.0 will provide new business opportunities for broadcasters and new services and products for consumers. Remember that the ATSC DTV Standard, now referred to as ATSC 1.0, is 20 years old! It incorporated technologies that are about 25 old. Industries prosper by leveraging new technology—and broadcasting is no different.

Any one of us involved in the development of 3.0 has a list of the benefits of the next-generation broadcast television standard. For the most part, all of have the same system traits on the list, but we might differ in our ordering of the categories.

For me, the number one characteristic of 3.0 is its flexibility, with a broad set of technical parameters allowing a wide range of potential services now and in the future.

ATSC enjoyed record attendance for its annual meeting earlier this month. We are building flexibility into every layer of the system including the use of IP or Internet Protocol—which is inherently flexible and interoperable. The whole world is IP and this positions broadcasting as a powerful part of the communications infrastructure of the future. That means lower-cost equipment and new distribution and device opportunities. Think of broadcasting as a “High Power-High Tower” nationwide IP network.

The 3.0 physical layer provides a myriad of options for broadcasters to configure robust transmission and reception of services to a variety of devices for indoor, handheld and mobile services. Of course, the ATSC 3.0 video and audio coding systems will provide broadcasters with various options to customize their service offerings.

An equally important aspect of ATSC 3.0 is spectral efficiency. ATSC 3.0 can provide new options for broadcasters and policymakers to consider as the incentive auction proceeds and the subsequent spectrum repack is completed. Giving broadcasters flexibility to optimize the auction is good for all, including the government.

And ATSC 3.0 will provide the technical tools for broadcaster collaboration in a given market—to optimize use of bandwidth.

For broadcasters interested in sharing a channel, 3.0 will allow you to offer your current services such as HDTV and multicast standard definition on half a channel. For broadcasters who are not interested in sharing a channel, 3.0 allows you to offer lots of services like Ultra HDTV with immersive audio, multiple mobile HDTV streams and interactive TV. Of course, some broadcasters may want to share a channel as a transition step and move to a full channel of ATSC 3.0 services in the future.

An unprecedented amount of participation by hundreds of volunteers is propelling ATSC 3.0 forward. ATSC member organizations represent the broadcast, broadcast equipment, motion picture, consumer electronics, computer, cable, satellite, and semiconductor industries.

As an international, non-profit organization developing voluntary standards for digital television, we welcome your participation in the drive to ATSC 3.0.

Mark Richer is the president of the Advanced Television Systems Committee.

Robert Gonsett
gonsett@gmail.com

SAN DIEGO— The Federal Communications Commission is considering a monumental change that will jeopardize its ability to control interference for the private sector. According to a recent story in TV Technology’s sister publication Radio World, “...the plan under consideration would reduce the number of field agents from 63 to 33 and reduce the number of director positions from 21 to five and the number of field offices would shrink from 24 to eight.”

Here in southern California, for example, the San Diego field office would close and the Los Angeles office would carry significant new responsibilities by watching over perhaps six or seven states including Hawaii while at the same time operating with a skeleton crew. So drastic are the anticipated cuts that the staff would only have time to handle public safety interference cases and little else.

This action is going to create a lawless environment where pirates and jammers will flourish. Case in point: Many months ago, four FM pirates (illegal broadcast stations) popped up all at once at scattered locations in the San Fernando Valley. The FCC knocked them all down. In the past few months, two of those pirates returned to the air and one of those appears to be running increased power. The reason that the pirates have returned may be a littleknown brand new FCC policy: Hands-off pirates unless they are causing direct interference to an authorized broadcast station and the FCC isn’t busy with higher priority cases like public safety interference. But the FCC is always busy with public safety cases. So, by largely dismantling pirate enforcement, the seeds to create a lawless environment have already been planted.

Let’s turn to the TV arena. Just over a year ago, the FAA accused a southern California UHF-TV station of causing interference to a high altitude en route VHF channel (133.2 MHz) used by aircraft. So serious was the reported problem that the TV station voluntarily left the air while private sector engineers worked overtime to assess the situation. The important point is that the FCC was ready to dispatch its own engineers at a moment’s notice if need be (we made telephone contact with the San Diego FCC field office to make sure of this).

Now imagine the situation with greatly reduced FCC staffing: There is no public safety issue because the TV station left the air and that action seemed to resolve the intermittent interference problem. Too bad if the station couldn’t return to the air quickly—that would be viewed as a problem for the private sector to address. (As it turned out, there was never conclusive evidence that the broadcast station was at fault; the FAA located a stuck microphone problem at its control center, the TV transmitter tested “clean” and the station successfully returned to the air without making any adjustments whatsoever.)

If FCC Enforcement Bureau staff and field office reductions go into place as now proposed, the broadcast community won’t be able to count on FCC field offices for any type of assistance. RPU jamming? Too bad. Two-way radio interference? A pity. A competitor doing something illegal? Forget it. Some other government agency using questionable engineering practices and accusing you of causing interference? Good luck. You can bet that a new generation of jammers and pirates will crop up knowing full well that the FCC’s field offices have been emasculated and will do nothing.

Fast action is needed (a) to reverse the FCC’s “hands-off pirates policy” and (b) to keep the commission from making drastic cuts to the number of field offices and the number of field agents. This is a one/two punch we don’t need. With interference and communications complexity increasing, we need more field engineers and more FCC field capability, not less.

Please forward this editorial to your director of engineering and general manager along with a request that an urgent appeal be made to Congress in Washington, D.C. Appeals must be made now to the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives by as many stations as possible. Unless the FCC’s “hands-off” policy toward pirates is reversed, and its drastic downsizing of field offices and field personnel is voted down, we are on the road to anarchy.

Robert F. Gonsett is president of Communications General Corp. a telecom consultancy in Fallbrook, Calif.

LAS VEGAS—At the 2014 NAB, Grass Valley dropped a bombshell when it introduced a three-sensor 4K camera, left, employing 2/3-inch CMOS chips, referred to as B4 mount. Sports and other stadium events telecast production companies had been demanding such cameras, and last year’s Grass Valley product set off a race among other camera makers.

Wanderers on the 2015 NAB show floor will see B4 mount 2/3-inch 4K cameras, not only from Grass Valley, but from Hitachi, Ikegami and Sony (on the tripod below). Canon and Fujifilm both have new families of lenses for these cameras.

The reasons these mobile truck and large venue broadcast companies wanted the 2/3-inch chip cameras instead of single Super 35mm sensor cameras, known as PL mounts, actually has more to do with the lenses than the cameras themselves. There are a couple of rules of optical physics at work here.

First, the larger the sensor is, the larger the lens. PL mount, long zoom range lenses that could replicate the fields of view that today’s B4 mount HD lenses do for outdoor broadcast would have the form factor of a World War II howitzer.

This is obviously not good.

The second problem these large sensor PL mount lenses present is that their depth of field for any lens setting is much shallower than for these same lens setting for a B4 mount 2/3-inch three-sensor camera. That shallow depth of field may be all the rage in Hollywood, but it would make the sports camera operator’s job of staying in focus a much more difficult task.

Further, when fans are watching a live action sporting event on TV, they’re used to more than just the player with the ball being in focus. They are accustomed to a greater depth of field.

In talking with representative from both lens companies, they explained that their prior top-of-the-line HD lenses actually were hitting 4K specs in the center of the lenses, but needed improvement in the corners. Their new products meet those corner specs.

When most people think of 4K they relate to it in terms of resolution, twice as many lines of horizontal and vertical resolution. But there’s also a greater color space in the 4K spec, and this, too, had to be addressed in the new 4K lenses. When one of these new 4K lenses is mounted on one of today’s HD cameras, the image is noticeably better.

The race to fill the upcoming 4K needs of outside broadcasters has just gotten started.

ALEXANDRIA, VA.—This may strike you as a bit early to be thinking about the 2015 NAB Show, but it’s been on our minds here in the editorial office for some weeks. Only a month or so away, this year’s convention will be the usual cacophony of sights, sounds and ideas. It can be difficult to identify the significant among the distractions.

This year, I expect the show to burst with 4K/UHD products and solutions, from cameras to lenses to recorders to switchers to editing software and effects. Of course, there are many issues concerning 4K production and distribution to be worked out; but the marketplace is voting swiftly with its wallet to accept many 4K products.

Bob Kovacs

If you haven’t looked, the price of a 4K camera can be just marginally more than the price of an HD camera of similar overall quality—and it many cases, there is no cost difference. Today, you can buy a 4K camcorder from a well-known manufacturer for less than $5,000 and immediately put it into use shooting ENG, commercials, features or other professional applications. No, it’s not as good as a Red or Arri 4K camera costing several times the price, but the camera will acquit itself well for the typical needs of a broadcast TV station.

Editing software is also now capable of handling 4K video files, as long as you understand that you may need to update your editing computer to deal with the 4X increase in visual data that 4K represents. If your system edits HD with some lag today, it will probably be uncomfortably laggy with 4K video.

Developments in monitors have also tracked the move to 4K production, with many new 4K consumer and professional displays in the past few months. Expect that these will be all over the NAB floor, as manufacturers put their best product feet forward.

Speaking of which, a couple months ago, a product vice president for a major manufacturer told me privately that he was pushing the company to introduce only 4K-capable cameras from now on. He didn’t see a market in HD cameras when 4K is available for about the same cost.

Today’s big question about 4K is how it can be distributed and broadcast. Sure, it’s great as a production medium, but can it ever be affordably delivered to homes? There is some 4K distribution via the Internet today (notably Netflix’s “House of Cards”) and you can expect to hear more about 4K broadcasting and distribution at the NAB. It’s coming, but the standards take some time to develop.

There are many reasons to go to the NAB Show, of course. If you’re like me, you love the smell of fresh electronics; and the sub-audible hum of thousands of power supplies is the music that calms your savage breast. New products, old friends and the latest in technology trends—I hope you can make it to the show.

ALEXANDRIA, VA.— For most of us, it’s difficult to imagine a world devoid of television, or for that matter, a world where there were only one or two channel choices and television service was limited to just a few hours per day. However, even in large cities, this is the way it once was.

Veteran television producer and director Joel Tator has now assembled a 167- page book that begins with a look at what Los Angeles television was like in its infancy in the early 1930s and tracking its evolution and changes over time.

“Los Angeles Television” is basically a picture book—an assemblage of historical photographs and reproductions of related items (newspaper ads, show tickets, station schedules and the like) with fairly lengthy and well-researched captions offering information about these photos and providing linkage to their place in the overall Los Angeles television history. This approach makes otherwise unpublished and inaccessible photographs available and, in this case, provides a good amount of factual information (not always the case in similar pictorial histories I’ve examined). Also, there are introductions for each of its four chapters that help set the stage for what’s about to be presented and put it in perspective. As such, while not a fully comprehensive and detailed history, “Los Angeles Television” goes way beyond being just some nice “eye candy.”

Klaus Landsberg played a large role in establishing television in Los Angeles. His credentials included the 1936 Berlin Olympics and RCA’s 1939 N.Y. World’s Fair TV demo. He’s seen here in an early remote truck he built for Paramount Pictures’ W6XAO.
HOW IT ALL STARTED

Tator begins his eight-decade tour of television in the City of the Angels with the hiring of young engineer Harry Lubcke, by Don Lee, an early distributor of expensive automobiles, who also had a keen interest in broadcasting. It was Lee’s intent to add a television station alongside his KHJ radio operation and Lubcke obliged, putting Los Angeles’s first electronic TV station, W6XAO, on the air in late 1931. It operated for one hour per day and reached all five of the known “television homes” in greater Los Angeles. (After a lot of twists and turns, it’s now known as KCBS-TV.)

Tator also does a very credible job of tracking the history of L.A. station number two, W6XYZ (now KTLA).

KLAUS LANDSBERG REMEMBERED

Of special interest to this reviewer is Tator’s introduction of another rather remarkable television pioneer, Klaus Landsberg in connection with W6XYZ/KTLA history.

Landsberg, probably due to his short lifespan (he died at age 40), is not given much page space in other histories. Tator makes up for this, interleaving mentions of Lansdberg’s brilliant record of television accomplishments throughout several chapters of the book. He was hired by Paramount Pictures to launch their TV operation (some 10 years after W6XAO took to the air) and spent the next (and final) 15 years of his life developing and finetuning virtually all aspects of television. Tator notes that Landsberg not only produced and directed all early major KTLA shows, but also served as the station’s manager, programmer, chief salesman, talent scout and chief engineer. Landsberg is recognized as an innovator who never accepted “no” for an answer. Tator offers as an example of Landsberg’s doing the impossible in connection with the first live telecast of a nuclear explosion. Media coverage had been approved less than a month before the shot, and when AT&T Longlines (what the company called its wire, cable, and microwave radio relay network until the early 1960’s) was contacted about getting the video from Nevada test site to Los Angeles, the company refused, stating that setting up the required connectivity would takes many weeks of construction and creation of 12 microwave relay points. Landsberg managed to do it in 18 days and with four microwave hops. All three networks picked up the April 22, 1952 KTLA coverage, allowing viewers across America to witness this television first.

BUILDING AND KEEPING AUDIENCES

“Los Angeles Television,” with its pictures and caption format, strikes a fairly good balance between the engineering and programming sides of television. Included are literally hundreds of photos of early live (they were all live then) television entertainers, show hosts and news men and women—some well-known and other not-so-well-known— who have graced Los Angeles TV screens at one time or another. (The cover artwork was created from a photo taken at a 1977 reunion of local L.A.- area TV personalities.)

While Tator’s “Not For Kids Only” chapter is devoted to young people’s programming, he notes that such shows were important to all stations, for in addition to attracting and keeping younger audiences, they also motivated parents to make purchases—especially television sets—thus growing the number of television households. As he observed: “A family could not watch the neighbors’ televisions indefinitely.”

Another chapter chronicles the development of variety and musical shows airing on Los Angeles stations and documents the arrival of a number of performers to the Los Angeles television scene, including some who made it to the network level (Johnny Carson, Steve Allen, Liberace, Lawrence Welk, Jack LaLanne, just to name a few).

TECHNICAL HISTORY CONTINUED

In addition to documenting the histories of L.A.’s earliest two stations, Tator also traces the beginnings of the remaining “original seven” VHF stations there, as well as the establishment of CBS’s “Television City” and NBC’s Burbank plant (originally known as the “NBC Color City” studios). There’s a reproduction of a ticket dated Nov. 3, 1953 admitting the holder to “The First West Coast Demonstration [of] RCA Compatible Color Television,” photos of what’s apparently the first use of a helicopter as a television camera platform (connectivity was via a long cable trailing from the “chopper”), a page devoted to the first implementation of the “Zoomar” lens on the West Coast, and much more, including plenty of early camera and remote truck photos. There’s even a very rare shot of Harry Lubcke seated at a 1930s television monitoring/shading console.

“Los Angeles Television” is a “must have,” especially for those who grew up in and around Los Angeles during television’s “Golden Age” And even if you can’t call L.A. home, it is certain to bring back many pleasant memories of time spent in front of the tube in the 1950s and 60s. I’m referring to the “cooking schools of the air,” wrestling matches, music shows put on by local talent or staff musicians, teen dance parties, and local kids shows—all staples of early live television, and all just about completely absent from TV today. As Tator rather poignantly observes near the end of his pictorial panorama:

“Among locally produced broadcasts that have mostly disappeared are children’s shows, variety programs, public affairs shows, and station editorials; look for them only in books.”

And that’s the way television once was! Get the book and relive some pleasant memories of a time when life was simpler— and TV wasn’t 24/7.

“Los Angeles Television” is available at book stores, amazon.com and at www.museum.tv.

James E. O’Neal is technology editor at TV Technology and is a retired television broadcast engineer with some 37 years of experience.

WASHINGTON—For those of us in the low-power television sector, the FCC’s upcoming Spectrum Incentive Auction has become either a potential fortune-maker, or business-killer.

While LPTV Class A licensees (4 percent of built stations and new permits) could potentially get a huge payday in the auction, regular LPTV licensees (96 percent), will not (there are currently 1,856 LPTV licensees controlling 6,500 built facilities and 3,500 new construction permits). Proposed legislation requires that we must pay our own displacement costs, but LPTV has “the right of displacement,” meaning we will either be assigned a new channel by the FCC using auction optimization software, or we may apply for a new channel by either changing our city of license or moving to an adjacent designated market area. assuming we can get this approved.

Nationwide, the 1,800 LPTV stations constructed between channels 51–38 (new national mobile band), and more than 2,000 currently on channels 14–36 will be displaced by primary stations not participating or winning in the auction, resulting in 3,800 LPTV and TV translator stations in total being affected. With an average cost of $150,000 per station move (based on the FCC’s formula), an unfunded mandate of more than $570 million is being forced on the LPTV industry. Include the build-out delay due to auction uncertainties, affecting more than 3,500 construction permits—many of which had intended on providing new advanced broadband services themselves—and the cost to our industry could easily exceed $1 billion.

Whether you agree with our analysis or not, GAO will be conducting a bipartisan request of the House Energy and Communications Subcommittee members to study these impacts on LPTV. With the auction being delayed until at least early 2016, there is time for the impact on LPTV to be independently analyzed, and for Congress to correct its mistake.

These impacts stand in stark contrast to the 4 percent of the LPTV industry, the Class As, which in about 140 of the 210 TV DMAs may be able to cash in and go out of business. Some of the valuations found in the auction proceeds evaluation report commissioned by the FCC are off the charts. Imagine spectrum from a Class A licensee being worth over $100 million, and others $25 million and above.

What makes the 6 MHz of an auction-eligible station worth a potential fortune, and the same 6 MHz of an LPTV licensee not worth much? Simply, it is a construction of Congress and nothing more. And why are these stations, the primary and Class A’s, which have the most extensive public service obligations, “auction eligible”? Shouldn’t they be the ones excluded from the auction? And why are the most gender and multiculturally diverse stations in the dense urban areas and rural areas the ones that are being displaced without compensation? The evidence supporting the spectrum crisis comes from a decade-old projection not borne out by current facts.

Even with the new six-month delay, the FCC is not slowing down its rulemaking process. The LPTV industry has to come up with a strategy now, in 2014.

First, in the LPTV rulemaking, the FCC wants comments about LPTV and TV translator channel sharing; the creation of a new digital replacement translator (DRT) service; the use of the FCC auction optimization software for LPTV displacements channel assignments; the operation of analog radio services by digital LPTV stations as ancillary or supplementary services; the elimination of the analog tuner requirement; and a catch-all of additional measures to preserve LPTV and TV translator services. This is all within the context of an unknown amount of time for the extension of the 3,500 construction permits, including the final analog to digital conversions.

Second, LPTV has to monitor and comment on additional rulemakings for inter-service interference, a spectrum grab by “Google-plex advocates” for unlicensed spectrum, and wireless Internet service providers wanting more spectrum in each market.

The auction is only possible because 16,000 MHz of LPTV and TV translator spectrum is being taken from productive use and investment opportunities, and 12,000 MHz more is being displaced, all without compensation. The FCC has twice said in the rulemaking that they have the authority to include LPTV in the auction, but that they choose not to because it would not help the auction. Why hasn’t the FCC done an economic study to back up their claim? Are they afraid of the answer?

We have until Nov. 12 to respond to the FCC’s latest LPTV rulemaking. For more information, visit www.lptvcoalition.com.

Mike Gravino is the director for the LPTV Spectrum Rights Coalition and an investor in two LPTV licenses in the Washington, D.C. DMA.

SPRINGFIELD, VA.—Broadcast Engineering magazine was a long-time favorite of mine, with articles that challenged me to learn more about video technology, and advertising that was often as educational as the articles. I probably saw my first copy in 1980, by which time it was recognizably BE, in a version that looked fairly modern by today’s standards.

The same can’t be said for the two copies of BE that TV Technology’s James O’Neal handed me the other day. Dated August 1962 and April 1963, these two issues provide a fascinating window into the state of television and broadcasting art in the early 1960s.

Starting with the August 1962 issue, the table of contents states that it is Volume 4, Number 8. That means that this was the fourth year of publication, which means that Volume 1 would have been in 1959. Number 8 indicates the eighth month, since BE is a monthly by this point. I do not know if the magazine started out as a monthly, but publishing has a long history of starting out as bi-monthly, then shifting to monthly publication as interest warrants.

The cover on the August 1962 issue trumpets a new series on transistor audio amplifier circuits, which was on page 18. The article, written by Donald K. Haahr from the engineering department at Collins Radio, shows a schematic for a four-transistor push-pull audio amplifier that uses transformers for both the input and output of the final (push-pull) output stage.

Keep in mind that the transistor was still pretty new and something of an oddity in 1962―it had been invented in 1949 and Haahr mentions this right at the top of the article.

“Bell Laboratories began exposing it 12 or 13 years ago and transistors have been in quantity production for the past seven or eight years,” he wrote.

The circuit discussed in the article has its performance shown in a graph that is formatted oddly by today’s standards: The frequency is plotted vertically and the gain (called “dB response”) is plotted horizontally. Those two would be reversed in a modern frequency response chart.

Haahr said that he wrote the article to demystify transistors, saying that they were not well understood for two reasons:

1. Many engineers feel the job can be done with vacuum tubes, so why waste time on anything else, and;
2. Lack of understanding makes almost anything complicated.

NAB wrap-up article text for the Television Zoomar 10x lens

Haahr attacked the status-quo of point one directly, pointing out that his employer makes both tube and transistor products that target different broadcast applications.

“For instance, the Collins 12Z2 Remote Amplifier weighs 45 pounds and the transistorized 212Z-1 Remote Amplifier weighs 21 pounds,” he wrote. “The latest model, the transistorized Collins 212H-1 Remote Amplifier, weighs 11 pounds and operates on flashlight batteries at a cost of less than one cent per hour.”

Elsewhere in the August 1962 issue were articles on a new 20 kW FM transmitter from RCA, a news teletype automatic Conelrad alarm, a discussion of proper audio studio maintenance (mostly cleaning techniques), and phase concerns with stereo phonograph records and how that affects stereo broadcasting.

FOCUSED ON RADIO

Nearly all the editorial content in the August 1962 issue of BE is audio-related or focused on radio broadcasting. There is lots of advertising but just a couple (including a full-page ad for Conrac monitors) are for television products. Of course, by the time BE printed its last issue in Oct. 2013, it was virtually all about television.

By the time the April 1963 issue of BE rolled around, there was more television content… at least from an advertising standpoint. In fact, one of the ads was a two-page spread for the Ampex VR-1100 quad video recorder, which the company trumpeted as costing only $35,000. In the ad, the company also said that the recorder’s maintenance costs are low, so companies back then could still promote their products with a wink and a smile!

The highlight of the April 1963 issue was BE’s NAB wrap-up article, which covered three pages. There are definitely some television products on these pages, including a 10x zoom lens for image orthicon cameras. Manufactured by Television Zoomar, the lens was designed by Pierre Angenieux, with an assist from Dr. Frank G. Back of Zoomar.

Other television products in the NAB wrap-up article include a Sony “miniature television tape recorder” that featured the ability to stop and display a single frame. Both GE and EMI/US had film chain systems for television broadcasting, and Mitchell Vinton “…had on display a wide variety of film and television-camera mounting equipment.”

On the floor of NAB 1963

The NAB wrap-up article ― and the magazine in general ― has a good sprinkling of photographs, although the NAB article is really a standout in regard to photography. The technical articles in the issue don’t have nearly as many photographs.

The April 1963’s cover shows a crowd shot at NAB 1963, and it’s notable for two things. First, there are no women in the photo… not one woman among the more than 50 men in the shot. Second, all the men are wearing suits and ties. I guess there was no attending the NAB in a t-shirt, cargo shorts and flip-flops, and exhibitors didn’t have their staffs wearing color-coordinated polo shirts.

There is lots more that could be said about this trip down Broadcast Engineering’s memory lane, but I hope you found this interesting.

James E. O'Neal

Several months ago, I shared my thoughts in this space about our country’s Emergency Alert System, explaining its somewhat tortuous history and underpinnings. In my rant I concluded that the EAS concept was probably a good thing and that the system might actually work as planned; however, I also enumerated some items that probably would preclude it from working as planned.

End of story! (Well, not quite.…)

In early March, a false weather alert was rather mysteriously been triggered in Indiana. It warned of an impending tornado (rare in early March, but this has been a really strange winter), and was automatically sent to thousands of radio listeners and television viewers, as well as to cellphones as a text alert and to computers as an email message.

As explained by one area broadcaster, the National Weather Service was reporting some rough weather in western Tennessee and somehow an alert about this got scrambled and relayed by a weather forecasting operation in Wisconsin. Subscriber stations automatically transmitted the warning to their audiences. That service’s defense was “we receive several feeds from various sources in order to make sure we don’t miss any essential warnings. One of those feeds carried the false warning message from the Weather Service.”

No panic, no real harm done; yet this shouldn’t have happened.

The station also noted that “the feed that carried the false warning is not monitored by our desktop application…”

Yep, it’s always the other guy’s fault and/ or we can blame it on a machine. However, when lives and property are at stake, it’s not really a good idea to assume anything and “just let George do it” for you.

In one respect, it’s good that at least some of the folks got the message and maybe took it seriously enough to seek shelter. However, once they learned it was a false alarm, are they going to take such messages seriously next time? It’s back to the old story about “the boy who cried wolf.”

This “wolf cry” prompted a letter from U.S. Senator Dan Coats (R.-Ind.) to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Administrator, Kathryn Sullivan, calling for an investigation. Sen. Coats noted:

“As a member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, I appreciate the services that NOAA provides, but I also recognize that the inadvertent or intentional dissemination of these alerts in the absence of severe weather diminishes their reliability and effectiveness.”

Coming right on the heels of this tornado flap was a story about an 11-year-old Maryland girl who went missing and triggered an Amber Alert. Fortunately, she was safely located and recovered after a tip to authorities from a South Carolina motel operator.

Both incidents are troubling, as in the first, a false alarm sent out but really wasn’t taken that seriously as clear skies prevailed at the time. The second event revealed something equally upsetting and important, as what I didn’t tell you was that the motel attendant found out about the missing girl through her Facebook account—not from an alert sent out by her favorite station.

These stories pair well with a couple of others from 2013. The first was the day-long lockdown in Boston after the Boston Marathon bombing in April and a few months later a record wildfire situation in Colorado. Despite the serious nature and potential for harm to the public in both of these incidents, EAS was never activated.

The explanation given for this omission in Boston was that the public was able to get all of the information it needed from social media and such news sources as CNN. (I’m not sure why the massive wildfires didn’t rate an EAS alert.)

So, the question I have to ask, given the amount of money and effort broadcasters have to expend to comply with EAS regulations, do we really need to be involved anymore?

As a life-long broadcaster, I never thought I’d be questioning the place of radio and television stations in providing alerts (CONELRAD, then EBS and finally EAS) to protect the public, but I have to wake up and smell the coffee—the public really doesn’t seem rely on us anymore to ring the alarm bell. Times have changed and so have we and so has the public. Back when these alerting systems were developed (especially the first two), most stations had real live operators on duty who were focused on delivering a single program “stream.” Fast forward to the 21st century and its lights-off automation, multiple content delivery, downsizing/employee multitasking, social media and the ubiquitous Internet, and it doesn’t take a multi-million dollar study to drive home the point that it’s not the same world that existed a few decades ago.

Even back then, there were alerting mistakes. The best-remembered was in 1971 when a military operator loaded the wrong “this is not a test” message during a routine EBS system test. The result was that very few broadcasters took it seriously, even though all stations were supposed to have received the message and complied with emergency instructions. Many operators either didn’t see it or just plain ignored it, as it came at the time of the regularly scheduled weekly test. (There were real live people in news and control rooms then.) In the aftermath, we had to face facts—EBS didn’t really work as it was supposed to and the public really wasn’t alerted to the degree necessary had there been an actual emergency, possibly an impending nuclear strike.

EAS seems to be even more problematic. (Check out Wikipedia’s “Emergency Alert System” entry which reports more than a dozen incidences of fairly serious EAS foul-ups; I’m sure there are others that didn’t get reported.)

The bottom line is that even though EAS is well-intentioned, and that while the people who build, install and maintain the systems are all very capable: (a) EAS is not infallible (even when some human monitoring does exist) and (b) EAS has become an archaic, expensive and burdensome system for broadcasters. (It seems to be more of a cash cow for the FCC’s pink slip writers than anything else—earlier this month the commission proposed more than $1.9 million in fines against Viacom, ESPN and NBCUniversal for airing a movie promo containing EAS tones, and there are some recent rumblings about making the system multilingual which will certainly translate into additional broadcaster expense and operational complexity.)

Also, does it really make sense for a station that’s covering a breaking story involving the safety of its viewing audience to have to break into that story and air an EAS message about the event?

Maybe it’s time to take broadcasters out of the alerting loop and start living in 21st century reality.

Your thoughts?

Jim Thompson
President
Broadcasters Foundation of America

As TV broadcasters, we are a central part of our community. Everyone in town has driven past the TV broadcast tower… that tall spire that transmits essential and relevant information and entertainment. It’s the engineers who are responsible for the tower, the receivers, the transmitters… for all the equipment that enables the television station to broadcast and remain integral to the community, sometimes with life-saving information.

We report on events—local and national— and we do what we can to help our community get through the hard times. We see the joy that emanates from parents and their teens when the high school football team wins a home game and the happiness that radiates from children when the playground in the town’s park is finally completed. We also see the sadness that strikes our community when disaster hits. We are an industry that cares, and we use the power of local television to do something about it!

But what happens when something tragic occurs to one of us? When it’s the TV engineer, the producer, or the news reporter who falls on hard times? That’s when the Broadcasters Foundation of America steps in.

For more than 60 years, the Broadcasters Foundation has provided financial assistance to broadcasters whose lives have been shattered by unthinkable tragedies. A 501(c)3 public charity, the Foundation is unique in that we exist solely to help broadcasters. Our grant recipients are your colleagues, hard-working, dedicated broadcasters who had productive lives and vibrant careers in engineering, programming, on-air, production, sales, management, even ownership, and more. Now, these same broadcasters are destitute because of disease, accident, and advanced age.

The Broadcasters Foundation delivers two types of financial assistance: monthly and one-time emergency grants. Our monthly recipients undergo a thorough screening and application process annually to determine need. Examples of situations where we have provided monthly aid include: a 20-year broadcast veteran who died of a sudden massive stroke leaving two children and a wife who suffers from Multiple Sclerosis; a successful manager paralyzed from the waist down in a tragic motorcycle accident; an elderly couple with stellar broadcasting careers who lost their home and cannot keep up with exorbitant medical costs.

One-time emergency grants have been disbursed to broadcasters whose lives or homes were affected by natural catastrophes like Hurricane Sandy. The emergency grants from the Foundation help offset the destruction caused by these disasters. As we all know, when most people are running for cover, broadcasters stay on the air to deliver vital information that saves lives. How many engineers have weathered a storm to keep their station broadcasting live?

Here are some of the thank you notes we have received from broadcasters that the Foundation has helped:

“MS has slowed every part of my life to something unimagined... My new normal contrasts sharply with my old memories of early sales meetings, days on the road, and then back to the office.”

“Your generosity will allow us to find a new apartment and walk away from our current living conditions, which have unequivocally curtailed my recovery from the stroke.”

“On the first of every month, when we get your check, I send up a special prayer to God to keep you going.”

Reading these stories of these brave broadcasters is a reminder that someone we know might be struggling. Our board of directors is comprised of some of our profession’s most influential leaders: David Barrett from Hearst, Dennis Swanson from Fox, Rebecca Campbell from ABC-TV, Paul Karpowicz from Meredith, Gordon Smith from NAB, and Phil Lombardo from Citadel, who also serves as our Chairman.

The board’s goal is that no broadcaster’s cry for help should ever go unanswered. The requests for aid have more than doubled. In 2014, we will disburse $900,000 in financial assistance, a 100 percent increase from five years ago.

Please, make sure every broadcaster you know is aware of the Foundation and the work that we do. Consider supporting our cause so that we can help those in our industry who need it most. Annual membership to the Broadcasters Foundation is only $150 per year, and a donation can be made to the Guardian Fund in any amount. Please visit our website at www.broadcastersfoundation.org or call us at 213-373-8250.

We hope you are never in a position to need charity. But with your support, we will always be there for a broadcaster who needs help.

AMSTERDAM — Just two years ago, people started talking about the iPad and labelling it as “totally disruptive,” which just means that it will change everything. Today, it both has and it hasn’t.

Second screen technology has been boosted by the formal adoption of HEVC. IBC’s exhibition halls house numerous companies offering different encoding solutions for multiscreen, many of which trumpet considerable bandwidth benefits of the new codec. Given the precarious state of European broadband, which presents an uneven picture, HEVC’s take-up is as likely to be as tied to the present HD broadcast infrastructure as it is to any forthcoming Ultra HD deployment.

A lot of debate about the second screen isn’t about the technology, which is almost considered a given now. Apart from a few innovations such as Civolutions’s audio watermarking that looks to tie second-screen experiences into time-shifted viewing, there isn’t even that much to say currently. The talk will be about the implementation of the second screen; how it can help broadcasters boost viewing figures without sucking the coffers dry, and how it gives them that all-important data return path to feed into big data initiatives.

IBC 2013 will have a lot about how broadcasters can create a genuinely ‘transmedia’ approach from commissioning onwards. That word is replacing ‘multimedia,’ which nowadays smacks too much of repurposing and half-hearted attempts to boost online profiles by flashing a #YourProgrammeNameHere graphic onscreen. Even the phrase second screen is starting to disappear, to be replaced by ‘companion screen,’ the reasoning being that the primary screen is always the one you’re looking at.

Creativity is required at all stages of the process and for all platforms.

“From four inches to 50 inches, all need amazing content, fantastic easy usability, connectivity and each needs to be able to serve as a companion to the other,” said Gerry O'Sullivan, Deutsche Telekom’s outgoing senior vice president of Global TV and Entertainment.

There have been some rather interesting surveys showing how the companion screen is changing viewing habits recently. Taking the United Kingdom as an example, the latest figures from the U.K.'s TV Licensing Authority in its 2013 TeleScope report (based on 2012 survey data) suggest that 40 percent of all tweets during peak-time hours are about TV programs, while tablet penetration has reached 11, and 49 percent of viewers use smartphones or tablets while watching. Contrast this to only 5 percent of U.K. households possesisng a Connected TV, and 35 percent of those not having connected that device to the Internet.

The Gartner Hype Cycle charts the introduction of new technology via distinct phases, with the first three being Technology Trigger, Peak of Inflated Expectations, and the aptly-named Trough of Disillusionment.

The sense is, that with the companion screen, the industry is past these three phases and setting off up the Slope of Enlightenment and towards the Plateau of Productivity. In other words, we are getting to the point where there is the chance to properly monetise all this effort. Connected TV itself, however, seems to be firmly languishing in the Trough, bedevilled by connectivity problems and poorly designed user interfaces.

Broadcast is still chasing social media, however. Indeed, one of the big conference keynotes at IBC is with Twitter U.K.’s general manager, Tony Wang, which raised questions such as ‘Should networks and advertisers be paying attention to a Twitter-based ratings service? And can a programme's engagement be evaluated on social media alone?’

Probably yes, and possibly not. One surprising bit of data from a survey published by the U.K.’s communications regulator Ofcom in August suggests that rather than technology pulling family time apart, the huge growth in tablets and smartphones is actually luring teenagers out of their bedrooms and back into communal family spaces—driven by event television on large screens.

The report also updated the number of tablet owners with more current 2013 data, more than doubling inside a year to 24 percent. That means that there are an average of three devices in every U.K. household capable of accessing the Internet, with one in five homes having more than six. And if that growth continues it probably will be, like, totally disruptive, dude.

One coda that’s worth noting is that of these figures do not just disrupt business in the established West. There is plenty of data starting to come out of emerging markets that suggests the enormous growth in mobile usage and rapid upgrade of networks is going to mean that entire continents almost will be able to jump a technological generation or two.

ALEXANDRIA, VA.—In September 1983, when we launched TV Technology, the Internet had not yet become an international communication phenomenon, cable was still in its infancy and satellite was characterized by those huge C-band dishes, which were still mostly found in rural communities. Since then, we’ve seen the evolution of HDTV, high-power analog TV has transitioned to digital, and TV has gone mobile in a big way.

Over the past 30 years, TV Technology has covered the most important developments in the technology that has most affected the broadcast industry. In honor of our 30th anniversary next month, we’re conducting a poll among our readers about the evolution of television technology during this time span.

If you’re a member of the TV Technology group on Linkedin, you can vote here. If you’re not on Linkedin or don’t want to join the group, please send an email to tvtech@nbmedia.com nominating your choice among the following five:

The Internet
The DTV Transition
HDTV
Media Consolidation
Growth of Cable & Satellite

Feel free to share your thoughts about your choice and if you think we’ve left out the most important choice, tell us why. The poll will be open until Sept. 5.

Results will be reported in the Sept. 18 anniversary issue.

Phil Laven telling the audience about possible future threats to TV spectrum, at last year’s DVB World.

From a broadcaster’s point of view, New Year’s Day 2013 was undoubtedly celebrated Jan. 25. That is when the International Telecommunications Union announced the first-stage approval of the new video codec H.265, also known as HEVC, for high-efficiency video codec.

While some broadcast-grade HEVC encoders were disclosed during 2012, the first end-user decoders were showcased at CES 2013, about 10 days before the ITU announcement.

The new codec seeks to achieve the same video quality of the established H.264/AVC codec using just half of the bandwidth. The final figures seem to confirm initial hopes. The École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne EPFL evaluated the subjective video quality of HEVC at resolutions higher than HDTV, and the study highlighted that a bit rate reduction ranging from 51 to 74 percent can be achieved based on subjective results, while reduction based on peak signal- to-noise ratio (PSNR) values was between 28 and 38 percent.

Those are two standard ways to measure the efficiency of a video coding standard. The first is based on the subjective (human) assessment of video quality. PSNR is based on an objective metric.

The results coming out from these two evaluation methods usually differ, but at the end of the day the subjective one is the most important way to measure a video coding standard, since humans perceive video quality subjectively. It’s not the best one, it’s just the one that can drive developers to a better user experience.

Comparing TV format resolutions and pixel numbers. In a bit more technical way: PSNR doesn’t take into account the saturation effect of the human visual system. PSNR also can’t estimate the ultimate nature of the artifacts: AVC compressed sequences feature some blockiness, while HEVC research tried to get a more “analog” effect. As a result, HEVC artefacts tend to smooth out the content, which is generally less annoying.

So HEVC looks good, according to the EPFL study, and that’s great news. If all global video content was compressed using HEVC, more than 25 percent of the current global network load would be freed up. Achieving this by implementing a single codec is amazing.

DUAL USE ...
Let’s look again at the EPFL study. They deeply tested HEVC “at resolutions higher than HDTV.” HEVC was not designed just to squeeze bandwidth. Since the very beginning HEVCalso was targeted at making Ultra HD television possible without the need to replace every existing broadcasting medium, including satellites.

A single 8K frame features 8,192 x 4,320 pixels, that is to say 33 megapixels, which is 16 times the pixels of a full-HD frame.

Let’s forget for a moment that Ultra-HD will probably feature more than 25 fps. You can broadcast a decent full-HD program at 10 Mbps (H.264). Using the same codec, this program at 8K resolution would feature a bit-rate equal to 16 times 10 Mbps, or 160 Mbps.

No terrestrial broadcasting system could deliver such a huge bit-rate in a 8 MHz frequency bandwidth (a stunning 20-bit/ Hz), and nor could any (existing) satellite transponder do it. So, to preserve at least the satellites already in service, and to save a lot of power in the future ones, it was clear that 8K broadcasting could make sense only with a suitable codec, able to squeeze the required bit-rate to sustainable levels.

With HEVC, 4K could be the near future. With the video and cinema industries already edging toward it, HEVC could shrink the 4K images (more than 8 megapixels each, 4x full-HD ones) in a compressed 20 Mbps stream.

That is to say, two 4K programs in a single DVB-T2 emission, and some in a satellite DVB-S2 transponder. A viable figure.

HEVC specs were also designed to suit content capture systems that feature progressive scanned frame rates. Standard display resolutions span from QVGA (320×240) to 4320p (8192×4320). Further, HEVC features improved picture quality in terms of frame rate, noise level, colour gamut, and dynamic range.

3G NETWORKS MAXED OUT?
Meanwhile, the notion that mobile video is pushing 3G networks to the verge of collapsing appears to be a myth. Last September, Analysys Mason (a consultancy firm deeply involved in the telecommunication market) published an amazing report that clearly stated that, far from growing dangerously fast, mobile data traffic may not grow sufficiently fast to stop the mobile industry from shrinking.

The reason: The disruptive effects of Wi-Fi are limiting the rate of growth, and operators will have to adjust their strategies to a different reality: mobile data growth, which had once threatened to overwhelm networks, should be growing at a more manageable pace, even in fast developing economies.

So why the panic over 3G networks collapsing? “Forecasting mobile (cellular) data traffic has been bedevilled by analyst excitability, the interests of vendors and operators (especially spectrum lobbyists), plus general innumeracy and wildly mobile- centric and content-centric views of telecoms,” the Analysys Mason report said.

So let’s be clear: overall mobile data traffic has to be properly sliced into “cellular” traffic and“Wi-Fi”traffic.

Cellular traffic is what you have when you’re driving or walking. It’s quite uncommon watching a video on your smartphone when driving your car. Hence, this mobile traffic will generally be made of “low bit- rate” traffic, e.g., e-mail and social network updates.

When you’re on a train, or sitting in a coffee-bar, you would probably drain higher data volume by watching videos, downloading presentations, and catalogs. But you will likely be connected to the Wi-Fi access point in your office, at your home, or in the restaurant.

So none of this traffic is flowing through the supposedly crowded cellular data networks. Access points are usually fed by wired landlines data connections. The nicest thing is that the competitor capable of diverting data traffic from cellular networks – thus preventing mobile network operators from charging their customers for said traffic – usually is just a separate business unit of the same mobile network operator, namely a landline telecom operator.

Anyway, the 800 MHz band has gone away from broadcasting. 700 MHz, in its turn, is packing up its bags.

WHITE SPACE THREAT
The next threat is a bottom-top one. I mean the so-called “white spaces.” These are frequencies allocated to a broadcasting service but not used locally, and guard bands between used channels.

In Europe, two parties are facing each other in a regulatory battle over white spaces.

The first are those who claim that white space devices must be able to detect their locations, then poll a centralized database for the locally available white spaces and tune to the centrally- approved white spaces only. The second are those who believe in these devices finding white spaces themselves by scanning for open channels, and capturing whatever space happens to be unused.

You can easily imagine what will happen to broadcasting should the latter party will prevail. Nobody knows if all this spectrum mess was really unavoidable, as a natural evolution of both times and technology. Or perhaps the whole broadcasting world is facing a hostile takeover by a party that has all: A clear strategy, a multi-national shape (unlike any broadcaster) and, for sure, a lot more money than broadcasters themselves.

LAS VEGAS -- This year’s show seemed to pick up where last year’s left off and was a fitting coda to the 4K craze that kicked off 2013 at CES. Our writers weigh in on their impressions...

Karl Paulsen, Media Storage Technology
The 2013 NAB Show will be remembered as the year that 4K as well as IP-based video distribution, routing and switching came of age. A paradigm shift in network- and video router-based system infrastructures now mitigates, in part, the legacy requirements that forced lower data rate encoding and decoding of SD, HD (and beyond) video for carriage as IP-based signals over Ethernet. Sony expects to release chipsets to OEMs this year which will allow synchronous video carriage over 1 and 10GbE (Ethernet), as IP, to reach the marketplace. New router platforms are adding “data-layers” and 4K routing, as well as extremely high density video routing matrices in 2000x2000 plus architectures in a single rack frame. These technologies are eye openers for those that came to learn and to buy. The feeling was that the attendees had a true, serious interest in finding out what the next generation of television is all about.

4K seemed to bring more real opportunities than 3D stereoscopic, such as in sports where super slow-mo and “HD image cutouts from 4K captures” make it possible to extract and track an HD sub-image from the larger 4K image. NAB saw more manufacturers than expected entering the 4K domain. Some took existing switchers and added software to gang groups of inputs to form the 4K “panel-set,” creating multifunctional, multiformat products with future proofing from existing products.

Jay Ankeney, Focus on Editing
Everyone was talking about the “cloud” at the NAB Show, but they weren’t always referring to collaborative workflows over IP. The most alarming cloud that hung over the Las Vegas Convention Center was the reality that more and more broadcast equipment manufacturers are finding it tough to make a profit in this game.

Was the downturn in flat panel TV sales responsible for one major display manufacturer to not hold an on-site press conference for the first time in recent memory? Will broadcasters lose the mobile video market to wireless carriers due to lack of profit incentives?

One major NLE company released a free-to-download version of their edit system for the Mac, making it the first such offering to run on all three major operating systems—Windows, Linux and OS X. But if that NLE innovator has given away almost a half million downloads of their software for free, how can they or their competitors get out from under that cloud?

Then there are 4K displays, leading to 8K and above. But like home 3D, is this once again a technology-driven marketing push that is devoid of consumer interest pull? To get the benefit of those higher resolution images, a home theater would need a pretty huge screen and it is still to be determined whether the average living room needs to be dominated by a 2001-sized video monolith whose head stretches right up into that aforementioned cloud.

Steve Krant, Correspondent
At my first NAB in Chicago in the early ‘70s, everything and everyone pretty much fit into one Chicago lakeshore hotel and it was all about the business and technology of broadcasting.

Not so much these days—it’s certainly bigger, with more “gee-whiz” exhibits and attendees from all over—but far fewer broadcasters. North Hall, with the most call letter-centric exhibitors, seemed eerily quiet except for a few anchor tenants after Monday’s opening rush; the herds had moved onto the content creation playgrounds in Central and South. 4K topped the buzz chart, but after 3D’s spectacular belly flop, I’m avoiding the Kool-aid. Spectacular images—there’s definitely a place for it in sports and original production—yet without a strong retail commitment to selling the benefits, not just planting sets on a display floor, will probably meet the same fate.

The “cloud,” this year’s co-headliner, with its own North Hall mini-pavilion, isn’t as much an innovation as a maturing of existing technologies. Migrating content, distributed control environments, etc. have been around awhile, but the underlying infrastructure is far more robust and capable.

Al Kovalick, Cloudspotter’s Journal
The trend to the “all IT” media infrastructure continues. There are clear vendor moves to support cloud storage/archiving, cloud-based web apps (SaaS) including platforms supporting production and broadcast operations. It’s exciting to see a few products with 10G Ethernet ports and supporting equivalent SDI payload over IP.

SMPTE, the EBU and VSF announced a “Joint Task Force on Networked Media,” which will map out a strategy for defining packet-based network infrastructures for the professional media industry supported by vendors, broadcasters and industry organizations. The key objective is to create, store, transfer and stream professional media using IT systems.

Twenty years ago, the transition from analog to digital created huge vendor challenges and opportunities. Likewise today, the move from AV-specific to an all IT/cloud world will shake up some vendors, create new ones and usher in amazing gains in operational performance and cost reduction.

Geoff Poister, Correspondent

Analog, DV, SD, HD, 2K, 3D, 4K, 8K = 15 years/Internet.

A quick look at this formula says that image-making technology has progressed at an accelerating pace while being divided by the Internet.

If you placed this on a timeline, there would be a long gentle slope prior to DV, followed by a sharp upward curve. That’s because once television, video and film went digital, it became governed by Moore’s Law.

The NAB Show is an ongoing testament to an industry struggling to keep up with accelerating changes in technology. But perhaps the biggest factor is the divisor in the equation: The Internet.

In addition to technology, discussions in the NAB sessions centered on how to navigate in a field where we don’t know where the screen is. Television is now described as two major species: Linear, which comes as a continuous stream; and another animal that is captured and displayed on mobile devices anywhere at any time. Both are now entering an uneasy partnership with telephone and wireless providers.

My takeaway from NAB is that technology will accelerate exponentially. That is not a problem, but an opportunity. The problem is the audience, which is now enmeshed in a digital world and is becoming as elusive as data from a stealth aircraft.

James O’Neal
Technology Editor
joneal@nbmedia.com Word reached us during the last week of August that John Henry Battison had reached the end of his life. Although this was not unexpected— he was just days shy of his 97th birthday and had been experiencing some health problems— it nevertheless came as a blow to those who knew him and what he had accomplished in his lifetime.

Perhaps you’ll remember him as the driving force behind the establishment of the Society of Broadcast Engineers. However, there was a lot more to John’s life than that. He was truly an engineer’s engineer and one of the few still around when both radio and television broadcasting began during the last century. He truly saw it all happen in his lifetime—crystal sets to HDTV.

If you met John once, you never forgot him—he was a man of physically small stature, was always outspoken and still maintained his British accent nearly 70 years after leaving his English homeland. He did his growing up in London, just at the right time to become one of the many young people caught up in magic of broadcasting when radio entered the home in the 1920s.

Like many of us who made a career in broadcasting, he was so enamored with the new medium that he took it to bed with him—listening to distant broadcasts when he was supposed to be sleeping. John was stealthier than most, however, and concocted an “early warning” system to signal his parents ascent up the stairway to make sure that lights were out and young John was getting sufficient rest for school the next day.

Speaking of school, John admitted that more than once he feigned health issues so he could stay home and experiment with his receiver constructed to receive the very early 30-line mechanical TV transmissions.

When he’d completed his formal education, radio and TV were in his blood and he went to work for Ekco, a pioneer British radio and television manufacturer. By this time the BBC had established a regular television broadcast schedule and there was a growing demand for “tellies.”

Unfortunately, political doings in Berlin soon spelled an end to both U.K. TV broadcasting and his employment at Ecko. With war formally declared, John followed up on another love of his—aviation. He enlisted in the RAF and spent the next six and a half years defending the homeland, piloting both Spitfire fighters and Lancaster bombers.

John Battison at age 16 operating a homebrew amateur transmitter Once the final “all-clear” was issued, John journeyed to the States to see what broadcasting was like over here, soon landing a job at Kansas City’s KMBC. From there, he spring-boarded to CBS television network in New York that was starting up. He worked with Peter Goldmark and recalled doing field strength measurements in connection with color transmissions from CBS’s experimental UHF transmitter.

John later decided to try out television broadcasting for himself, and with the help of a factory deal from the Dumont folks, set out for New Mexico to launch one of that state’s early TV stations. There John did it all—engineering duties and appearances on the other side of the camera. Two of the staples of early TV broadcasting were wrestling matches and children’s shows. John announce the matches, providing commentary as the hulks did their body slams and headlocks. At other times, he would don different garb and become a slightly different type of engineer—a locomotive driver—as he hosted the local kiddies hour.

John was afflicted with a lifelong wanderlust, and in time left New Mexico to become an international broadcast consultant. When he eventually returned to the States, he learned that two leading electrical/radio engineering societies—the AIEE and the IRE—had decided to merge into one organization (the IEEE). John was fearful that this amalgamation would leave radio and TV engineering staffs without proper representation and decided to launch a professional organization directed solely to the interests of the men and women who operated broadcast facilities—the Society of Broadcast Engineers. He personally mailed out thousands of membership queries to help get the new organization off the ground in 1964.

John continued in broadcast engineering, later becoming director of engineering at Ohio State University’s telecommunications department. He also authored some 15 engineering textbooks and published more than 500 technical articles. Another of John’s broad range of interests was religion. Somewhere in his busy life, he made time to become ordained an as Anglican Church priest, and for many years conducted services in Columbus, Ohio, making a 160 mile roundtrip commute from his home every Sunday to preach the gospel. This ministry continued until just a few weeks before he passed away on August 28.

The broadcast engineering world is a better place due to John’s efforts. The shadow he left was a very long one. He will be missed by us all.

Dear Editor,

Mark Aitken I am writing to clarify, for your readers, some positions and proposals that can be directly attributed to me, and more broadly, the organization for which I work (“LTE Tempts With Advanced Services,” May 30).

As the vice president of Advanced Technology for the Sinclair Broadcast Group, I make every effort to take in the technological surroundings of our industry in order to advise my organization regarding the possible future realities. Some of those realities are unavoidably easy to see.

First and foremost….big stick broadcasting is not dying. In fact, local television broadcasting is where the future of wireless lives! Our transmitters and antennae on tall towers, when coupled to the spectrum through which we serve the public, have the potential to best serve the American public with the most widely demanded, efficient and cost effective wireless services. As an industry, we supply the world with more mass consumable bits than any other entity.

We are presently severely disadvantaged by our digital television standard. When our “over-the-air service” is held up alongside the other relevant wireless providers of services, we lose. Yes, we provide the best and highest quality HDTV. Yes, our local news, weather, traffic and local community programming is the most sought after viewing. But we are no longer a provider of what was once a ubiquitous service. In the not so distant past, local broadcast television was ubiquitous by virtue of its presence in almost every living room of America with programming that was available from no other provider. That is simply not today’s reality.

To be both relevant and competitive, we have to change the means by which we do business. Of primary and immediate concern, to be ubiquitous tomorrow, we must be able to reach our audience wherever they may be, on whatever device they are using, with the content that they want, when they want it. All of this is possible only with a new and fully capable broadcast platform.

This new broadcast platform will most certainly not be backwards compatible with today’s television broadcast standard. However, by harmonizing with many of the world’s underlying global wireless technologies we could provide benefits to consumers, device manufacturers and broadcasters alike.

The idea of LTE-Advanced being a part of our future was first introduced to American Broadcasters by me and a great friend, Mike Simon, at an ATSC Symposium on “Next Generation Broadcast Television” 18 months ago. It was introduced within the context of what we have referred to as a “Broadcast Overlay”, which envisioned the use of our broadcast spectrum and facilities to off-load DOWNLINK traffic from wireless carriers. The premise is a simple one: use our current facilities with an upgrade to a new broadcast platform (new standard), to deliver bits for the wireless carriers.

By virtue of our licensed “ERP” emanating from tall towers, we carry an advantage in being able to cover large areas from a single broadcast site. But again, to be both relevant and competitive, we must be able to offer a QoS (quality of service) which rivals that of our wireless competitors. That will require some additional towers/ repeaters be added over time, but nothing near the hundreds and thousands required by the wireless phone companies. With a fully capable new broadcast platform, the ability to seamlessly extend and complement our service area can be accomplished with a handful of strategically placed “SFN” (single frequency network) transmission facilities. They “embellish” the QoS, but are not required to start.

Vinton Cerf, considered one of the fathers of the internet for co-designing the TCP/IP protocol, when asked what he’d like to see next, is quoted to have said “…a vision that includes internet packets raining down from the sky.” I like to think of Television Broadcasting of the future as the “cloud” from which that raining of internet packets flows. Imagine people pulling from the “Broadcast Cloud” the bits they wish to consume—live real time or cached.

The terms “Broadcast Overlay” and “Broadcast Cloud” are interchangeable; they are one and the same. They represent what and who broadcasting needs to be to remain relevant and competitive. We can deliver “bits” to consumers wherever they may be on whatever device they are using, with the content that they want, when they want it, with the right broadcast platform. Let’s all make sure our heads are in the cloud—the “Broadcast Cloud”!

Mark Aitken

Vice President, Advanced Technology

Sinclair Broadcast Group

Hunt Valley, Md.