For Fox HD, Variety Is the Splice of Life

[Gregg Lengling]

High-Tech Strategy Will Give Affils Choice of Six NFL Games Each Week

By Daisy Whitney

The Fox Network's calculated decision to stay on the sidelines and let other networks roll out high-definition content first could pay off when the NFL regular season kicks off Sept. 12.

That's when the rubber will meet the road for the new HD strategy that Fox is now introducing across its affiliates. Fox is installing equipment to enable its affiliated stations to carry hi-def content starting this fall. The killer app will be the ability to carry six NFL games in HD each Sunday instead of one or two. A station won't carry all six games, of course, but will be able to carry the regional game in its area in HD most of the time with the new system.

That's because the network plans to deliver the content to its affiliates through a splicing system that will allow stations to receive the content without the need to compress and decompress it. As a result, Fox will require substantially less bandwidth to deliver the picture, freeing that unused bandwidth to deliver the additional HD games.

Since sports has been considered one of the key drivers of HD, Fox's plans speak to the value it places in sports to drive HD adoption.

As of Sept. 12, at least 70 Fox affiliates should have the requisite equipment in place, representing about 80 percent coverage of the country, said Jim DeFilippis, VP of television engineering at Fox. The network began the installation in March. All of the 194 Fox affiliates that have made the transition to digital will have the splicing system in place by the end of the year.

High-definition programming is traditionally delivered using 45 megabits per second [Mbps] of satellite bandwidth. That amount of real estate is necessary because the signal has to be decompressed at the station into what's known as "baseband video" so that it can be viewed as a picture rather than as data, and so local content, such as commercials, as well as a station's logo and branding, can be inserted into the feed. Once that material is added, the signal is recompressed.

The splicing system, by contrast, allows a Fox station to switch the signal between the network and the local station without decoding or re-encoding. The Fox HD service will be delivered at between 9 Mbps and 17 Mbps, Mr. DeFilippis said.

"It's the concentrated orange juice that's really been concentrated so we can fit it all into our satellite in the sky," Mr. DeFilippis said.

In addition to the saved bandwidth, a splicing system should allow for better video and audio, he said. While HD pictures certainly look crisp and beautiful using the current method, some quality is inevitably lost when a feed is decompressed. After a picture is encoded and decoded a few times, it can start to look blocky.

The brilliance of the splicing system is that it allows Fox to use less transponder space because it isn't sending as many bits, said Del Parks, VP of engineering and operations at Sinclair Broadcast Group, which counts 20 Fox affiliates in its portfolio of 62 stations. If Fox were to feed multiple football games in HD without a splicing system, it would need probably six more transponders, Mr. DeFilippis said.

While the system is "completely innovative," it is new and has to be proven, Mr. Parks said. Still, "It seems to be a well thought out, well-organized plan that uses the latest technology to achieve a result no one else has yet achieved, and I'm anxious to see it work," he said.

When Fox fires up HD in the fall, it will carry at least 60 percent of its prime-time content in HD, making a wholesale transition from the 480P wide-screen format it has used for the past few years. "I think what people have accepted is to move forward in HD you have to have ubiquitous content," Mr. DeFilippis said.

Fox spent $16 million with Thomson to install the splicing system at its affiliates.

Because of the sheer number of games Fox can carry, the system helps move Fox closer to the notion of an all-HD world, said Andy Jackson, senior director of media group and systems at Thomson Broadcast and Media Solutions.

Given that ABC, NBC and CBS have already made substantial investments in HD equipment, it's unlikely they would switch gears and invest in new technology immediately. After all, MPEG splicing wasn't an option four years ago when NBC, for example, built out its HD infrastructure.

However, the Fox plan does conserve bandwidth and could be interesting to watch in that regard, said Tom Duff, director of digital television for NBC.

While NBC has no specific plans to change the way it delivers HD, a splicing system could be an option for the future, he said. "We'd have to evaluate what it means for our existing infrastructure," Mr. Duff said.

PBS uses a method somewhat similar to Fox's. It delivers two digital feeds-one in HD and the other a multicast-that some PBS stations splice at a local level. #


   
     © Copyright 2004 by Crain Communications

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