Media Visions Reports

The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarded a 2008 Technical and Engineering Emmy to DirecTV and Tandberg for their development and deployment of an MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding (AVC) systems for HDTV.

To learn more about the technical breakthrough behind MPEG-4 AVC and its implications for the television industry, TV Technology’s Ken Judah Freed spoke exclusively with Romulo Pontual, the chief technology officer and executive vice president for engineering at DirecTV, a News Corporation company.

by Ken Judah Freed

TVT: Please describe what led up to the development of MEPG-4 AVC.

Pontual: We first asked ourselves how we could rebirth our activities to be a national leader in HD while preserving our existing services.

We saw by 2004 that the challenge was how to transition our satellite broadcasts from normal standard television to high definition. There was no technical standard for transmitting HD by satellite, and the nascent compression technology for HD still needed more testing before it was ready for commercial use.

After much research, we finally realized that we needed more satellite spectrum capacity and we needed new equipment to transmit in HD.

TVT: How did you go about doing that?

Pontual: We started three major projects. The first project was to expand the satellite fleet to be able to handle our transition from SD to HD. The next project was to change our transmission system to make it compatible with the new satellites for HD. The last project was to introduce a new compression method suitable for HD.

TVT: Can you say more about the compression project? Isn’t that where Tanberg became involved?

Pontual: Yes, we worked hand-in-hand with Tandberg as our compression supplier to develop and prove the technology we felt had the capacity to provide the quality we wanted. Together we decided that only MPEG-4 AVC could give us the compression rates and quality we wanted to obtain. Tandbeg’s competence in HD enabled us to jump-start our efforts.

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The Avid Nitris NewsCutter system let CBS News transmit HD at 1080i from the Democratic National Convention

by Ken Judah Freed

CBS News arrived in Denver to cover the Democratic National Convention less than a month after the “Tiffany network” commenced broadcasting the news in HD on July 28.

“We immediately started getting rave reviews for the quality of our video and audio compared to the other networks,” said Walt Leiding, technical supervisor and editor for CBS News, who’s working from a multi-trailer compound in the Pepsi Center parking lot outside the DNC.

“I’m sure the reason is that CBS News is broadcasting in 1080i instead of 720p like ABC and the others,” he said, “so even when we were carrying the same pool feed as everyone else, our signal has been superior.”

Live and edited signals from CBS News at the DNC in Denver passed through Fujutsu MPEG-4 encoders for transmission by Level 3 over ten 100 Mb paths (300 milliseconds latency) directly to the CBS News control room in New York, where the DNC coverage was switched live.

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After years of legal delays from community opposition, the consolidated tower facility on Lookout Mountain is finally constructed and broadcasting digital TV to metro Denver.

By Ken Freed
Correspondent, TV Technology

It took an act of congress, but the long-delayed consolidated DTV tower on Lookout Mountain at the western edge of metropolitan Denver is finally built and actively in use.

Overseeing the construction effort since December 2007 has been Don Perez, the retired chief engineer from KUSA.  Passage of Senate Bill 4092 in December 2006, Perez said, gave the Lake Cedar Group consortium of local TV stations “a blank page to construct whatever we needed to construct on Lookout Mountain to deliver DTV to Denver, but we decided it was best to follow the ODP [original design plan] approved by Jefferson County before the federal act was passed.”

Sticking to the ODP, he said, meant embedding 80 percent of the new transmission building in the mountainside and anchoring the new 734-foot dielectric antenna tower 100 feet lower on the mountain than the base of the building, both actions to reduce visibility of the facility.

“Anchoring the tower into the cliff of solid rock was quite a feat,” Perez said. “The tower can withstand sustained winds of 110 MPH, not just occasional gusts. It’s really an engineering marvel.”

The ODP also called for burying the transmission lines in a tunnel between the building and the tower, doing this to avoid any possible winter icefall in high winds.

The final ODP promise will be kept in the summer of 2009 after the DTV transition, Perez said, which is removing the analog towers for the three stations from the mountaintop and fully restoring the native landscape.

As part of the process, he said, all the stations decided together about what would be common equipment bought by Lake Cedar Group, and what would be up to the stations to buy themselves, such as equipment for their separate rack rooms. (more…)