Broadcasters wanting the most cutting-edge solutions for digital video storage can consider solid state “flash” memory, yet spinning disk drives and digital tape remain the most cost-effective solutions for the majority of operations today.

“We keep a week’s worth of material online in a shared storage system,” said Victor Murphy, director of technology and operations at CBS affiliate WUSA-TV in Washington, DC, “but we’re still archiving on tape, and I’m not sure when we’ll migrate the archive to online or nearline. With budgets being what they are, we have to be very careful about what we choose as solutions.”

WUSA recently moved from Avid’s Unity system to an Avid Interplay shared storage solution, which stores one week of programming, interstitials and spots, Murphy said. “It’s very comforting to have such a resilient and redundant system in house, so I’m sleeping a lot better at night now.”

Murphy said WUSA is not looking at solid-state storage. “Flash is a heck of a lot more expensive than a RAID array, especially with spinning hard drives getting cheaper and offering more capacity every day.”

Cost is the key factor in storage choices, said Karl Paulsen, CTO of Azcar Technologies, a systems integrator based in Canonsburg, PA. “Recognize that higher costs means higher performance, such as for Fibre Channel disc storage with immediate access for multiple channels of ingest and playback.”

Paulsen noted that some storage solution vendors are focusing are internal applications and some on external, such as shared storage server networks for the main facility in contrast to small flash cards in field HD camcorders and trucks. “The main issue is getting all of the systems to operate together seamlessly within the context of operation automation.”

Paulson said broadcasters should not expect universal standards for video storage any time soon. “The technologies are changing too fast, so there is no market advantage on developing standards that locks everyone into one way of doing things.”

Drive Types

Four types of hard drives are being used for video storage, said Andrew Warman, senior product manger for Nexio servers at Harris Broadcast in Northridge, CA. These are SCSI, SAS, FC and SATA drives.

SCSI drives using the Ultra-2 standard get data rates up to 80 megabytes per second with up to 15 devices connected to a single SCSI port in a daisy-chain. The latest Ultra-3 standard will handle data bursts from 80 Mbps to 160 Mbps.

SAS (Serial-attached SCSI) drives offer transfer rates from 3 gigabits per second (Gbps) up to 10 Gbps or more. SAS drives are compatible with SATA drives.

SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) drives are a major advance over the Parallel ATA drives in use for the past two decades on most computers. SATA drives start at 50 Mbps and eventually will surpass 600 Mbps.

Fibre Channel (FC) drives use a SCSI body with an FC interface to get data rates of up to 4 Gbps over optical fiber, coax cable or twisted pairs. The FC port allows for maximum stream connectivity of all these drives.
SCSI, SAS and FC drives are all designed for high performance and continuous operation. They can handle higher temperatures and more online connections because they are built with more robust components. Lower cost SATA disk drives are chiefly designed for intermittent use by consumers, like ATA drives, but SATA drives can better handle multiple I/O streams and the connectors are more sturdy.

“The biggest trend among broadcasters,” Warman said, “is switching to lower cost SATA drives because they offer the most storage capacity for the money. The SCSI drives have the highest reliability, and they are good for servers with multiple users, as are the enterprise-class SAS drives. If you need to share content instantly with multiple users across a SAN [Storage Area Network], FC and SAS drives are probably best.”

IT Adoption

The quick adoption of IT technologies by broadcasters is producing the shift toward SATA drives, said Ross Summers, product manager for servers and digital news production at Thomson Grass Valley in Beaverton, OR. “A lot of the IT infrastructure in a facility can be leveraged for video storage. We’re seeing more customers taking advantage of this internal bandwidth with Fibre Channel systems up to 50 terabytes or more.”

According to Johnathon Howard, director of broadcast media at Avid Technology in Tewksbury, CT, their most popular solutions right now are standard Ethernet-based shared storage solutions, such as the Avid Unity ISIS (Infinitely Scalable Intelligent Storage) media network that can be linked to provide a thousand terabytes of storage, called a “petabyte.”

Creating clusters of storage systems is a related trend, said Geoff Stedman, Senior VP of products and marketing at Omneon in Sunnyvale, CA.  “We’re seeing customers constructing interconnected storage nodes over fiber that allows them very good scalability and performance. Instead of server islands, such one for production and another for master control, now all the users in the media facility can share access to the same content at once for streamlined workflows. You can write to a file once and not have to manually update multiple copies or backups on different servers.”

Improved access to archives is what most impresses Fred Fourcher, president and CEO of BitCentral in Irvine, CA, “Archives no longer need to be offline on tape because of costs. Based on interviews with the owners of the 70 Oasis storage systems we’ve installed, the average station archives up to 300 hours of HD video per year, which is about five terabytes a year. The current price for SATA disk storage is $1,000 to $1200 per terabyte, which means $5,000 to $6,000 per year, and the cost of drives is coming down fast. Even better, we’ve found that if a station has online or nearline archives, they access their archives much more often than with tape.”

Douglas Brooks, product manager for server and storage hardware at Apple Computers in Cupertino, CA, agrees with this trend. “We’re going to see increased online delivery of stored video, as with the Final Cut Server. We’re moving toward an almost totally tapeless workflow, so ingest and editing and playback are integrated into one storage system. This will allow smaller operations to have the most advanced storage technologies.”

Lower costs

Lower costs shaped the prediction from Sherry Zhu, director of marketing for servers and storage at SeaChange International in Acton, MA, “In five years, the costs of drives will be so cheap that broadcasters will be able to afford converting a large portion of their operations to flash memory, like cable is now doing for video on demand. This will become more critical when broadcasters launch VOD services of their own to take advantage of cable’s capacity for advanced services on the digital set-top boxes.”

What does Murphy expect to be doing at WUSA in five years?  “Five years is a lifetime in this business,” he said. “I assume that we’ll have some sort of solid-state memory system in place for online, but I don’t know if the archive will be that way yet. The archive probably won’t be on hard drives any more. We may be using blu-ray discs, but I honestly don’t know.”

Yet Murphy is certain about one thing. “Whatever system we choose will have to be file agnostic and vendor agnostic, able to handle a variety of files and formats, whether SD or HD or graphics or data. The hardest part is not the storage but keeping track of the materials. Anybody can put together a rack full of RAID drives, but knowing where to look for something in that rack and having it instantly accessible, that has to be our top priority.

Originally published in TV Technology magazine - 6/25/08
© 2008 by Ken Judah Freed

Hurricane Gustav

Bill Quinlan will never forget the 2004 hurricane season. As the chief meteorologist for ABC affiliate WCJB-TV20 in Gainesville, Fl, he reported three major hurricanes hitting the Florida peninsula in six weeks. Hurricane “Charley” arrived on August 13, “Frances” arrived on September 5, and “Jeanne” arrived on September 26.

WCJB did not yet have the advanced weather graphics system recently acquired from WSI, Quinlan said, “so to show the power of the 65 MPH wind speed, one of the anchors went outside with his necktie tied to stick. The tie flew out straight and was flapping so hard he could barely hold on.”

Nowadays, WCJB uses the WSI TrueView Titan with Vortex severe storm real-time weather graphics system. “TrueView was enhanced this year to better track hurricanes now and compare them to the storm tracks of past hurricanes,” said Bill Dow, VP of media product management for Weather Services International (WSI), based in Andover, Maine.

“Our next generation volumetric 3D imaging system, TrueViewMax, lets viewers fly through a storm above detailed earth terrain and shimmering water as you display temperatures or rainfall on the ground,” Dow said. A related trend is integrating multiple date sources into the graphics images. “We can merge radar from 140 sites around the country into a seamless mosaic snapshot that updates every five minutes as the radar recycles. These still images can be looped into an animated graphic.”

AccuWeather’s new CinemaLive HD 2.0 graphics systems offers a three-screen WeatherCockpit that supports Microsoft’s Virtual Earth platform for 3D mapping from a global view down to the street level. The key is CinemaLive’s True 360° 3D graphics architecture, said Barry Myers, CEO of AccuWeather in State College, Pa. “Instead of just standing in front of the graphic,” Myers said, “now the weather presenters can use our virtual set capabilities with live rendering on every graphical layer to put themselves into the eye of the storm.”

Integrated into the SelectWarn 3.0 severe storm system, Myers, said, AccuWeather’s new hurricane package uses data-driven models to render images live as data arrives. Data sources include National Weather Service reports along with the Doppler and NexRad radar networks. Every ten minutes, he noted, hurricane hunters from the National Hurricane Center and the U.S. Air Force transmit sets of data snapshots captured every 30 seconds.

Weather Central offers three hurricane-related products, said Steve Smedberg, operations VP for the company base din Madison, Wisc. The 3D:Live interactive real-time weather presentation system uses the same reporting and forecasting tools as the National Hurricane Center as well as NOAA Hurricane Hunter aircraft reports. The system’s hurricane functions include instant warnings on-air with the click of a button by the presenter.

ESP:Live offers “hyper-local” mapping with advanced storm tracking algorithms, an array of interactive data displays and a suite of workflow tools, Smedberg said.

The Live:Wire HD first alert system, he said, allows multiple station-branded crawls in English and Spanish from almost any web browser. The integrated SimulCast server can control video output from the newsroom or a remote location while automatically sending XML-formatted alerts to the broadcast channel and the website simultaneously.

Baron Services offers an advanced hurricane package that unites real-time weather graphics with meteorological data from radar, government weather services and its own value-added reports, said Bob Baron, president, CEO and founder of Baron Services in Huntsville, Ala. “The data has to be good, or it doesn’t matter how pretty it looks.”

Baron’s graphics reflect the latest innovation in dual polarity radar, he said, so horizontal and vertical sine waves are pulsed naonoseconds apart within the rotating one-degree radar beam, returning two different echoes that give a more complete picture of atmospheric conditions in a full circle around the radar installation.

“Our dual pole radar lets us detect and forecast rain, hail, snow, tornadoes, and tropical storms with accuracy at an order of magnitude greater than ever before possible,” Baron said. “This is critical in hurricanes where most of the flooding comes from rainfall rather than the storm surge.”

Orad’s new 3D Weather product builds on the company’s 3D Designer on-air graphics for SD and HD with virtual set capabilities for automated integration of weather data pulled from diverse sources, said Shaun Dail, VP of sales and marketing in North America for Israel-based Orad, which has U.S. offices in Denver and Jersey City, NJ.

“Designer builds the graphics templates that get customized as data is imported,” Dail said. Orad’s HDVG system can overlay and fit video onto any object, such as a map of Florida. “If a hurricane makes landfall in West Palm Beach, for example, we can get resolution down to one meter per pixel to visually show the eight inches of rain on the ground with instant previews in real time before the graphics go to air.”

The key trend in weather graphics, Dail said, “is that meteorologists are looking for systems that incorporate a high degree of automation with a low degree of manual intervention. One day we’re going to see totally automated weather systems with a touch-screen interface inside a virtual environment.”

Vizrt offers a competing 3D real-time weather solution, Viz Weather, that integrates hurricane and other weather data from a range of providers with advanced mapping functions to automatically trigger graphics and animations, said Ran Yakir, head and R&D for Vizrt in Israel, which has U.S. offices in New York City.

Vizrt’s main U.S. customer, so far, is The Weather Channel, which uses data from the National Weather Service, National Hurricane Center, and it’s own value-added data sources to generate the Vizrt graphical displays.

“We offer the ability to interact with the graphics live through a user-friendly clicker,” said Yakir, “and to display the graphics in any sequence desired, not in a predetermined order, which promotes clearer storytelling to help viewers better understand the storm being reported.”

According to Ed Piotrowski, chief meteorologist at ABC affiliate WPDE-TV15 in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, “We want to empower people to feel they are getting everything they need to make the right decision on what to do before and during a hurricane. We cannot get information on the air too quickly, providing it’s accurate.”

There is no substitute for effective weather graphics, said Piotrowski. “A meteorologist at one of the inland stations a few years ago went outside in the earliest stages of a hurricane, stood next to a palm tree and then held on to it for dear life while an elderly gentleman entered the camera frame and casually walked behind the weathercaster without a single hair being blown out of place.”

Originally published in TV Technology magazine - 8/06/08
© 2008 by Ken Judah Freed

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.

To handle all the details, Perez relied on project manager Brian Mortimer from Calcon Constuctors in Englewood, Colo, specialists in “difficult” construction projects. Mortimer said the Calcon crew ranged from 12 people to 75 people “when we were working at full push from October through December last year, plus there were about 200 subcontractors.” Among these was the tower construction crew from Radiant in Canada.

Since most of the three-story building is dug into the mountain with walkouts on one side, Mortimer said, “we blasted out 20,000 cubic tons of bedrock.” The most challenging part was digging a trench, ten feet wide and 240 feet long, for the sloping conduit tunnel that ran from the bottom floor of the building down to the base of the tower.

“We were too far from the road and the slope was too steep to use our heavy equipment,” said Mortimer, “so we had to get down there with a back hoe and carry out the rock with a forklift.”

“Everything in the commonly owned space is 100 percent redundant,” Mortimer said. In case of power loss, Cancon installed two 1.5 megaWatt Cummins diesel generators with tanks holding 20,000 gallons of fuel. Each generator can come online within 12-15 seconds, he said, and each can power the entire facility. Whichever unit kicks in first takes over the load and the second unit drops back to idle.

“We had a ground-up opportunity to do a lot of good things in the new building,” said Eric Buckland, engineering manager at KCNC-TV, branded as CBS4 in Denver. Buckland joined the station as chief engineer five years ago to support David Layne, the director of broadcast engineering.

Buckland said KCNC installed a Harris PowerCD UHF ATSC transmitter with two multi-stage depressed-collector inductive output tubes (IOT) for amplified ERP of 974 kW over assigned channel 35. The station currently is covering their DMS by transmitting ATSC at only 24 kW until the February 2009 transition.

As a backup, KCNC installed a Harris DiamondCD solid state UHF ATSC transmitter operating at 15 kW.
Antennas the transmitters are hung separately on the tower, with the secondary antenna 100 feet lower. Buckland declined to say which station’s antenna as the highest one on the tower. “We all agreed not to disclose this, so no one can claim to have the highest antenna. It’s a marketing thing.”

Buckaland reiterated the redundancy theme. “We have a Qwest T1 line for STL and TSL along with the BAS microwave system. We have our own four-wire and two-wire phone lines between the station and transmitter in case the Qwest fiber is cut.”

And to keep the power flowing, KCNC installed a 400 KVA UPS to support the primary transmitter and half of the equipment rack. A secondary 150 KVA UPS supports the backup transmitter and the other half of the rack. “We can switch where the power goes,” Buckland said, “so each UPS can support either transmitter or either side of the rack. Each UPS provides 30 seconds of power failure ride-through as the diesel generators kick in.”

KCNC went state-of-the-art for their dual UPS systems, both built by GE and containing Pentadyne flywheels, which operate 24/7 and “avoid the needs for banks of chemical batteries,” he said. The flywheel, suspended on its rotor axle without bearings by magnetic levitation, uses the inertia of the spinning mass to store and generate power kinetically. The Pentadyne UPS flywheel and rotor weigh 50 lbs and spins at 5200 RPM.

Standing next to KCNC’s dual UPS units is a third GE UPS with a Pentadyne flywheel, a 90 kW unit owned by ABC affiliate KMGH-TV7. “We only have one UPS because CBS4 has more transmitter equipment tthan we do,” said Rick Craddock, director of engineering at KMGH.

KMGH installed a single Harris Platinum VHF digital transmitter, noow operating on low power at 15 kW over channel 17. When analog shuts off next year, Craddock expects FCC approval for analog channel 7 to become digital channel 7 and operate at full power.

Like the other stations in the consortium, KMGH had been transmitting with a low-power ATSC transmitter from atop Republic Plaza in downtown Denver. “We moved all digital operations to Lookout Mountain last May 19, Mother’s Day,” said Craddock.

Like the other two stations in Lake Cedar Group, Craddock said, “we have not yet moved our ENG receive site there. We’re still migrating from our analog tower site a little to the southwest, practically a stone’s throw from the new tower.”

The third station in the new facility, NBC affiliate KUSA-TV9, also installed a Harris VHF Platinum transmitter for full power on channel 16 at about 1,000 kW. Until the DTV transition, the station is broadcasting half power at 500 kW, said chief engineer Ken Highberger. “I think it’s quite understandable that all the stations chose to go to the same transmitter vendor.”

However, KUSA chose not to use the UPS system chosen by KCNC and KMGH, Highberger said. In fact, they chose not to install any unilateral UPS, relying solely on the diesel generators for the whole facility. “The Harris transmitter already has built-in redundancy,” he noted, “and everything is modular.”

Highberger added that KUSA decided to build up its operations in the new facility incrementally. “We’ve already installed big ticket items like the transmitters. The rest of the equipment, like a Leitch distribution amplifier, is being installed one month at a time. There’s nothing special in our design. We’re sticking with what we know.”

Perez said that he just happy the facility finally is built and in operation. “It took us a long time, but we all got to where we’re supposed to go.”

——————————–

Originally Published in TV Technology on 8/20/08. (c) 2008 by Ken Judah Freed

When the Committee On Arrangements for the 2008 Republican National Convention took over the Xcel Energy Center in Minneapolis-Saint Paul on July 21, they kicked off six weeks of intense work preparing the facility for the 39th Republican convention on September 1-4, 2008. This is the first national political convention in Minnesota since 1892, when the Republicans nominated Benjamin Harrison.

The 20,000-seat Xcel arena with four seating levels, a state-of-the-art facility that opened in 2000, needs to accommodate 30,000 delegates, party officials, volunteers, and guests plus 15,000 members of the media. Fortunately, much of the media operations will occupy 475,000 square feet of workspace in the adjoining Saint Paul RiverCentre convention center and The Legendary Roy Wilkins Auditorium.

One of the first tasks for the works crews, said Gordon Pennoyer, deputy director of media operations for the Committee On Arrangements (COA), is removing about 3,000 seats for the main convention podium and assorted television networks anchor or camera positions.

The Xcel Center already contains the Al Shaver Press Box on the fifth level along with 62 suite on that level and another dozen on the concourse level, of which 23 are being converted for use as media studios. Another nine media suites are being fabricated on the concourse level.

Crews are taking out seats in front of all these media suites, Pennoyer said, so studios can extend out and down, allowing reporters to do interviews and stand-ups with the convention floor behind them.

Additional chairs are being removed at selected sites around the hall for about 30 camera positions being created amid the seating and on the arena floor, Pennoyer noted. Most camera positions will be “unilateral,” assigned to specific media operations, and the remainder will be available on a per-use basis through the COA.

A secondary floor is being installed above the existing cement floor to provide space for cabling. About six miles of phone and Internet cables are being installed throughout the facility for a total of 4,500 digital and analog lines. This does do not include any of the cabling that media networks are installing themselves.
Some of the wiring will be hidden, such as the existing data lines that connect to the 360-degree, full-color LED ribbon board signage. Some of the cabling may pass through the four spacious concourses, 70 feet in width, that permit open sightlines across the arena.

Some of this installed cabling will support the skyboxes and anchor suites of the five principal HD pool members, NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, and CNN. The plans are all confirmed, according to pool producer Margaret Lehrman, the senior producer for coverage and special events at NBC News in Washington, DC.

In addition the HD pool members, Lehrman said, the pool has four subscribers so far, including C-SPAN and NPR. She’s received inquiries from a half dozen others, including the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which wants to put video on its newspaper website.

“We go up with pictures each day a half hour before the opening gavel,” Lehrman said, “and we stay up with pictures a half hour after everything ends for the day. We’ll be providing up to 30 hours of programming overall.”

The 14 cabled and two RF pool cameras from Game Creek Video’s production truck will cover the entire convention floor and provide exclusive behind-the-scenes footage. Game Creek’s new Northstar HD truck will be parked in the loading dock, the normal location of production trucks for sporting events.

Tandberg encoders at the Xcel Center will multiplex the signal over a 270 Mb Vyvx circuit to NBC News in New York, which will distribute the feed by satellite. The pool feed also will be uplinked to New York for the Xcel Center as a backup.

The pool feed will include a live outside of the Xcel Center transmitted over the Internet by Streambox to NBC News in Washington, DC. “The broadcast-quality beauty shot will be useful for cutaways and interstitials,” Lehrman said, “so we’re not concerned about the 3.5-second latency from using the Internet.”

For those not subscribing to the expensive HD pool feed, the COA is providing its own SD feed for $500, Pennoyer said, which will include original footage, some video from the HD pool, a Spanish translation, and a closed captioned version. “We’ve had requests from an array of local and independents stations as well as from newspapers and periodicals that stream video on their websites. It’s up to the subscribers to convert our SD feed into whatever format works for them.”

To reduce the level of frequency coordination needed for the pool feed, Lehrman said, the crew members mostly will communicate with cellphones. “We’ll rent cellphones locally, so they all have the same area code, because that will let us do group calling that links everyone on the line together.

All RF frequency coordination goes through the SBE’s Political Conventions Communications Committee (PolComm2008), chaired by broadcast consultant Louis Libin at Broad-Comm in Woodmere, NY.
Coordinating frequencies above 1 GHz at the RNC is the Minnesota state frequency coordinator, Marc Majerus, the assistant chief engineer at Fox affiliate KMSP-TV9 in St Paul.

Frequencies below 1 GHz are being coordinated by Howard Fine, VP of broadcast operations for the Pacific Television Center in Los Angeles.

Libin, Majerus and Fine is making sure all RF equipment is assigned a frequency prior to the Republican convention. Trained volunteers will inspect, tag and monitor every piece of RF gear brought onto the site.
Libin said he also looking forward to FCC support for field tests of low-power wireless microphones and other devices operating in the “white space” between television channels. “These tests would be conducted only during off-peak periods during the conventions,” he promised, “so there would be no risk of interference with convention coverage in prime time. The convention offers an ideal opportunity to test the limits of what the white space can handle.”

Pennoyer anticipates the facility to be a constant “hotbed of media activity” during the convention. The U.S. morning shows starting production at 4 AM and there’s a 15-hour time difference between St. Paul and Tokyo. “We expect the RiverCentre and Wilkins media workspaces be in use 24/7,” Pennoyer said, “and that will be convenient because they are within the same security perimeter as the Xcel Center, making it easy to move between the venues.”

Spaces within the three venues have already been assigned, he reported, and there is no production space set aside for independent media. However, there will be open areas with free internet connections for journalists to plug in their laptops to edit their video stories or write their blogs.

Not everyone will be indoors, however. ABC and Fox will be based in production trucks outside in the parking lots.

Fox News plans 21 hours of RNC coverage though almost every program on their weekday schedule, starting at 8 AM with Fox and Friends, plus special convention coverage anchored by Britt Hume, said Jeff Hark, senior director of production for Fox News in New York. An ongoing “Strategy Room” discussion with rotating anchors and guests will offer regular commentary segments.

Video and audio from skybox and broadcast platform to the right of the main podium will feed the “Fox News Experience” in the parking lot, Hark said. The outdoor compound will be built around the new CorPlex Iridium HD production truck, contracted through Alliance Productions.

The Fox tent will be next to the walkway used by delegates to enter the facility, Hark said, “We will invite the delegates to walk though to see us at work and leave with some Fox News trinkets.”

Fox will shoot at 720p for ATSC in the U.S. and DVB-T2 for the rest of the world, Hark said, “Fox Sports chose 720p, and that format was adopted by Fox News.”

Fox also plans to distribute disposable video cameras to delegates on the floor, Hark said. “They will shoot whatever they like, return the cameras to us, and that footage will add a grassroots feel to our convention coverage that’s not been seen in the past.”

——————————–

Originally published in TV Technology on 8/20/08. (c) 2008 by Ken Judah Freed