Fox Plots Hi-Def Course

[Gregg Lengling]

By Mary C. Gruszka
TvTechnology

New York

The Fox Network is honing down the process of delivering HD signals to affiliate.  When the network goes live with 720p programming this fall, Fox affiliates will be the first among commercial stations that will not have to convert the HD feed to baseband for inserting local content.

"This is the first time someone is choosing to deliver HD in this way," Setos said.  "This is very cutting edge.  This keeps the signal from having to go to baseband, which maintains integrity," Said Andy Setos, executive vice president, News Corp. news technology group and Fox president of engineering.

The distribuition of HD to affiliates centers on the Terayon BP-5100 broadcast platform, dubbed the "Fox Splicer."

"The Fox Splicer is a specific implementation of the BP-5100 platform," said Andrew Steele, senior director of business development for the digital video solutions group at Terayon.  "Fox is using two specific features of the initially - MPEG splicing and logo overlay.  What really gets to the heart of the value of the product is that we do splicing and logo insertion without decoding and re-encoding (the signal) in the HD environment.  Since we do this in the digital stream, we maintain the vative HD picture quality.  For HD, the quality of the picture is where the value is."

SNIP

(There is much more to the article but gets more and more technical, just wanted to bring to the news group here that Fox is doing some special things to make sure their HD product is good.  Gregg)