Sinclair Equipping 45 Stations With Drones

Sinclair Broadcast Group is making a commitment to drone-based newsgathering with the goal of equipping 45 of the company’s TV stations with the miniature remote-controlled hovering aircraft by the end of 2017.

That was the word from Sinclair’s Jeff Rose, who has the title of UAS (unmanned aircraft system) chief pilot for the station group.

Rose revealed details of Sinclair’s drone program when he led off a panel discussion on new electronic newsgathering technologies at TVNewsCheck’s NewsTech Forum conference in New York on Tuesday.

Ten Sinclair stations are already equipped with drones and the personnel to operate them who have taken a required course and obtained FAA certification to pilot the machines, Rose said. He said Sinclair’s safety policy calls for two pilots to operate a single drone at all time.

“Viewers love drones. They go over really big,” Rose said. He noted that the best stories for drone-based newsgathering are those involving a large geographic area — preferably one with few or no people, since the use of drones for news-gathering over population centers has not yet been approved for local TV stations.

One story he said benefited from the use of drones was one that a Sinclair station in Oklahoma did recently about the largely deserted town of Picher, Okla., where decades of lead mining poisoned water supplies and caused chronic sinkholes, cave-ins and related irregularities that rendered the town unlivable. Drones provided an invaluable overview of the town, he said.

For its growing drone fleet, Sinclair is using Inspire 1 drones from DJI Inc., but the company plans on upgrading to a new generation of DJI drones — the Inspire 2 — for its future drone purchases. “This is great equipment,” Rose said.

Elsewhere in the session, which was titled “ENG Evolution: Everything is Changing,” NewsTECH Forum attendees heard a presentation from Mike Englehaupt, VP-chief technology officer for Graham Media, on the subject of video-return technologies and how they’re helping TV reporters in the field.

Another panelist — Michael Porter, VP of business development for Telescope — talked about his company’s involvement in helping news organizations capture and package relevant content from social media.

A fourth panelist — Louis Libin, founder and president of Broad Comm, a broadcast-technology consulting firm — discussed the continuing battle that TV newsrooms are waging for the spectrum they require to operate wireless equipment.

Libin’s view is that the FCC has made little or no effort to organize or license wireless broadcast technology. As a result, “millions” of wireless mics are in use, he said. “The FCC never got it or they never cared about it,” he said. “Every wireless mic needs to be protected.”

To listen to a recording of this panel session, click here.

Read all about the NewsTECHForum here.