Hearst Budgeted For Upgrades, HD, Mobile

Due to the improved economic climate, Hearst Television VP of Engineering Marty Faubell has a bit more to spend on technology in 2011.

That’s a good thing because, he tells TVNewsCheck Contributing Editor Glen Dickson in this interview, he has plenty to do to keep the 29-station TV group at the top of its game.

This year, he will be finishing up a major master control upgrade across all stations and moving ahead with HD news in four more markets.

He will also complete the rollout of the Next-Generation Newsroom initiative, which is aimed at putting portable acquisition and transmission gear in the hands of photographers so they can quickly deliver breaking news to station websites.

At the same time, he is making sure the group can follow through with its commitment to introduce mobile DTV this year as a member of Mobile Content Venture, the joint venture of NBC, Fox, Ion and eight other major station groups.

And at NAB, he will be looking for tools to help stations better comply with loudness and closed-captioning regulations.

An edited transcript:

What’s your technology budget like this year? Is it up or down compared to last year?

It’s up from last year. I don’t think that’s unique to us or anybody else in business today. You know, 2009 was a difficult year and that certainly reflected on the spending levels across the group.

Any big projects planned for 2011?

We have a couple, one of which is we’re merging some operations in a split market, [KHBS] Fort Smith and [KHOG] Fayetteville [Ark.]. We’re going to consolidate that in Fayetteville. That’s a continuation of a plan that started probably two years ago, and we’re going to complete phase three of that this year.

In general, we outlined a strategy to get all of the stations to what we call single-pass master control. We would have liked to have done that in one step for each market, but the economics and timing made us bite that off in two pieces or, in some markets, three pieces.

But this will be the final year of that migration strategy where we leave the legacy of standard definition behind and move to master control fully equipped for HD, including full HD servers. So all syndication that’s available in HD and all commercials that are available to us in HD can now be aired in HD. That’s a big final step for us to make. So the footprint is done this year.

We will also move along past that [to news]. We have got a number of markets doing local news in HD and we will have more to do this year.

Speaking of HD commercials and syndicated content, has the delivery of HD content to the stations improved?

Yes, there are a few pieces. There’s DG Fastchannel/Pathfire and there’s Pitch Blue. We have migrated to a platform that gets content from both of those, conforms it to our on-air server and moves it in an automated way to the on-air server.

The backup that we built a number of years ago, the central distribution center in Orlando, continues today supplying somewhere north of 1,000 shows a month across the 29 television stations.

There’s still a great deal of linear satellite feeds, still a lot of the day-and-date stuff that comes down as linear feeds, though a good portion of that has migrated to file-based delivery. So we straddle both of those lines and probably will for a good number of years yet to go.

Certainly, migrating the whole group to one standard-flavor server has been a huge benefit to us, not to have to conform different flavors for different servers for different stations. That was an effort that we undertook three years ago, and this will be the third and final phase of that as well.

What server platform have you standardized on?

Harris Nexio.

Hearst is a little unusual in that you actually have your own satellite capacity, and you use that for some of the syndicated distribution that you’re talking about, correct?

Yes. We still maintain one full-time transponder on Intelsat, and its primary function is for newsgathering. But in the absence of news, which is a good percentage of the day, we take that bandwidth and use it to send out content from our CDC [the content distribution center in Orlando] at the same time to all 29 stations. So, it’s very effective in the use of the down-time between newscasts.

Besides the centralized ingest and distribution center down in Orlando, are you doing any other hubbing or centralcasting in master control?

There’s another aspect to the CDC. There are the satellite providers of content and commercials, but what I call the second wave has hit us in the industry, and that’s the Internet as a delivery model. So, we have added the second phase to our CDC in Orlando, which is that we have an integration into eight commercial providers today which automates the process of getting those commercials, conforming them and delivering them to our stations. The peak load so far on that on a monthly basis is about 800 commercials. Whether they’re HD or SD, it doesn’t matter.

Is that basically a big transcoding farm to take all these different formats and get them into the format you need for playout?

That’s exactly what it is. We have centralized the ingest of those [spots]. From a bandwidth perspective, it’s more efficient. From a transcoding perspective, it’s more efficient. And from an interfacing standpoint, we have standardized around a platform that they [the commercial providers] have to interface to.

Who do you use for transcoding?

We use two different providers on the syndication and spot. At the station, it’s Masstech. At the ingest point for the Internet spots, it’s Telestream.

You talked about HD news. How many of your 25 news-producing stations are doing HD news today?

Six do it today, and we’re in the process now of getting four more up this year.

What are you doing for field acquisition with the HD newscasts?

It’s kind of a mixed bag. It’s [widescreen] standard-def in the field, but all internal weather, studio cameras and graphics are HD. So we don’t have any markets yet in the acquisition business of HD, although that’s likely to change even as I speak. We have that opportunity. We’re looking at it deeply. We have made purchases last year and just made some more purchases this year for ENG acquisition that is natively HD.

What type of cameras?

We bought the Sony [XDCAM HD] 320 series and the 350 series.

So you’ll have 10 HD news stations by year-end. What about the rest of the group?

The rest of the company, except for one market, is already or will be switched very shortly to widescreen SD. That’s widescreen from the field and the studio.

When you put in HD news, are you using any production automation systems like Grass Valley Ignite or Ross Overdrive?

No, we’re not.

So it’s really a matter of upgrading your gear. You’re not overhauling your workflow as part of the improvements.

Well, I can’t say we have not looked at it. In fact, we have standardized around the Sony 9000/8000 series switcher. It’s been an effort on Sony’s part over the last three years. I know my first conversations go back almost four years with them. They have a product called ELC [Enhanced Live-Production Control System]. It’s on the air in I guess 30 markets now, and it does work. Gannett, Fox and a few others have it. It is an option for us. It clearly would bolt into our existing Sony infrastructure.

As you know, the big driver with most people for production automation is head count. What’s your thinking?

We attacked this from a different direction early on with the development of our own HATMOS [Hearst-Argyle Television Media Object Server protocol] graphics automation, which greatly simplifies the crew complement required to do local news. So in most of our markets, we have consolidated down to where there’s a TD, an audio operator and, depending on the market size, either one robotic operator or a couple of camera operators. So we have attacked it from a different direction and worked our way to a complement that would suggest that just from a pure financial perspective, [production automation] is not that attractive.

The other big thing you’re doing on the news side is the Next-Generation Newsroom. How has that project gone since you started it last year?

That was a big initiative, and we will finish the roll out this year of the entire footprint of the news department. The first layer was to give them smartphones that can grab photographs and get them back to the station. So, first on-scene, first information back.

The second layer to that was first on-scene, get some video back. That was the strategy that we employed in two ways. One was an air-card into a laptop with Streambox software and an IP-enabled camera. Typically, we have gone with the JVC HM-100 for those applications. There was an alternate layer that we have employed in about six markets right now, which is basically a skunkworks internal project that we call the “go-live cam.” We developed it internally. It’s basically a black box that cost us sub-$1,000 and bolts on the back of a standard ENG camera. Into that box you can either plug an AT&T or Verizon air-card and can wirelessly stream back at a relatively low-resolution bit rate. In one market, we have five of those. The concept again is first on-scene, first information back. So in the absence of a live [ENG] truck or a satellite truck, you have accessibility to 3G and now we have tested it with 4G in two markets. As that improves, it will be another tool in the arsenal.

Has Next-Generation Newsroom worked out as you expected in terms of getting more original content to the websites?

It has, and its acceptance is growing. Now what we want to try to do is to get this to a level of equipment cost and performance that would enable us to equip all of our photographers in the field so that if they are out in any news vehicle and are first on the scene of an important or breaking news story they can get content first back to the web. But we have not neglected the fact that the go-live cam or our streaming tools at the laptop level also enable us to get it on television. So it’s an additive tool to our arsenal, and it’s to the benefit of both the web and television.

Hearst is a member of Mobile Content Venture. Where do you stand with the mobile DTV rollout now, and what are the plans for the rest of this year?

We have two markets on with mobile right now, WESH in Orlando and WLWT in Cincinnati. We fully support MCV and we will enable more markets as that program requires. I really can’t comment much beyond that in terms of which markets and when. But, absolutely, we stand behind the MCV effort fully and are prepared to step up to fulfill the Hearst-related obligations.

Since the digital transition a couple of years ago, have you continued to make improvements in DTV transmission? Have you switched channel assignments anywhere or boosted power in any markets to make your coverage more robust?

Yes, we found as some others did that the power levels that were initially authorized for some of the high-band VHFs, such as in Baltimore and Lancaster, turned out not to be sufficient. In both of those markets, we have gotten FCC permission to increase the power levels.

Is VHF viable for mobile DTV?

It does work better for UHF, but that’s not to say it doesn’t work at all for VHF. There are some limitations for VHF so it’s going to require some additional steps in those markets, probably for repeaters. But our performance with UHF in Cincinnati has been simply stellar.

You’re speaking about spectrum issues, in particular the potential impact of the FCC’s broadband plan on broadcasters, on a panel at the NAB show next month. What should broadcasters be focused on as the debate over spectrum repacking goes on in Washington?

The government wants more spectrum for more [broadband] applications. But they can’t be focused on just one industry. I think the debate needs to be more focused on not just the spectrum allocation as it stands today, but to do a deeper dive into the utilization of that spectrum. Is there the same expectation that spectrum is available in all the other applications currently in place?

Are there any particular new technologies or products that you’re going to be looking for at NAB, either in terms of things Hearst needs or things that you would like to see for the industry in general?

I am intrigued with the new rules now being formulated vis-à-vis the CALM Act [legislation in Congress regulating broadcast loudness] — not just from a compliance standpoint, but also as to the definition of what loudness is and the measurement of that. To receive a complaint that I was too loud seems to indicate that somebody’s perspective on that was different than mine. So how do I go back and find my problem, document my problem and either prove to myself that I had a problem or I didn’t? And furthermore, to whose satisfaction do I prove it?

So what tools from a fix-it standpoint exist? The trade magazines are full of solutions today directed at complying with the law, even though the FCC has yet to issue the absolute rules to define how we do that.

Closed captioning is another example. If we get a complaint that a caption was missing, and if I don’t fix it going in, what could I do after the fact and how do I learn from my mistakes or learn from errors that occurred?

Our obligation is to adhere to the rules both in the practical application and in the spirit. We take those responsibilities seriously. But I want to enable the stations, which are very busy in their everyday functions, to do a better job of monitoring their compliance. So we’re on the hunt at NAB for compliance tools

Going into the show, what’s your sense of the overall mood? How is business for vendors, and what do you think the attendance will be like? Is it going to be a healthier show than last year?

I think clearly it’s going to be a better show premised on the fact that 2010 was better financially. So there’s a little bit of a rebound there. I think you’re going to see a better attendance at NAB this year than certainly the last two years. I think the industries are still focused on the very fundamentals of business. Some of the rocks, the solid companies that have existed all these years, have changed or have been challenged. So there’s a little bit of a fold-back period and a re-growth. I am kind of excited to see who rebounds and what comes from that.