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News
Stevens backs 2009 digital deadline as lawmakers finalize DTV legislation
Oct 11, 2005 8:00 AM, Beyond The Headlines e-newsletter
U.S. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-AK)said last week that he supports setting 2009 as the year for completing the transition to digital television. Stevens said his committee would take up DTV legislation to set a hard deadline on Oct. 19, Reuters reported.
With a Jan. 1, 2009, hard date, there would be three Christmas buying seasons during which Americans would buy digital television sets, Stevens said in remarks to the Association of Maximum Service Television conference.
After the analog television turnoff, the government plans to auction most of the analog airwaves to commercial wireless providers, a sale that is expected to raise billions of dollars. Some airwaves would be set aside for public safety organizations.
Stevens and other lawmakers want to use some of that auction money to partially subsidize equipment to convert digital back into analog for those households that cannot afford to buy new sets.
Steven said the Oct. 19 committee session is part of the budget reconciliation process. Senate rules restrict consideration of non-budget provisions on reconciliation bills, which means that issues such as multichannel must-carry may be precluded in the primary bill due to a procedural roadblock, the National Journal reported. This would require all non-budgetary issues to be addressed in separate legislation.
Steven’s aide, Christine Kurth, told the conference that a subsidy for converter boxes to allow consumers to watch digital programming on sets that receive analog signals likely would pass under the Byrd rule — named for Sen. Robert Byrd, (D-WV).
The Byrd rule dates back to the 1980s when its sponsor chaired the Senate Appropriations Committee. Because reconciliation bills are immune from filibusters, the rule was written to prevent "extraneous matter" — primarily non-budget proposals —from being attached to a measure that required only 51 votes to pass, as opposed to the 60 votes needed to cut off a filibuster.
Stevens said that legislation to fund location-based, "enhanced" 911 services — or E-911 — as well as a measure to fund a new DTV-based emergency alert service might be included in the reconciliation package.
Broadcasters expressed worries about the second bill strategy — noting that a single senator can more easily defeat non-budgetary legislation under Senate rules, since such a measure is subject to a filibuster, the National Journal reported.
Under the current plan, all broadcast and telecom proposals would fall into a second, non-budgetary bill. Kurth said no decisions have been made about what elements will fit into the second bill.
Autodesk buys Alias
Oct 7, 2005 9:32 AM, Beyond The Headlines e-newsletter
Autodesk has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Alias and its 3-D graphics software, in a deal valued at $182 million. The transaction is expected to be completed by April 2006.
The newly acquired assets will add to Autodesk's media and entertainment portfolio, that includes Alias’ Maya, MotionBuilder and FBX software. Autodesk’s current 3-D authoring toolset features Autodesk VIZ and 3ds Max.
Alias, with revenues of $83 million in fiscal year 2005, is headquartered in Toronto. Autodesk said it would continue to develop the Alias product line in conjunction with Autodesk's complementary products and technologies.
For more information, visit www.autodesk.com and www.Alias.com.
Online pioneer wants to shake up TV
Oct 7, 2005 9:45 AM, Beyond The Headlines e-newsletter
Jeremy Allaire, an architect of Macromedia’s Flash technology, has founded a new company that will allow television producers to market their programming directly to viewers over the Internet, according to the New York Times.
Called Brightcove, Allaire said he plans to shake up the television industry by allowing all types of video producers — from media giants to anyone who has a camcorder — to put their work on the Internet and make money if anyone watches it.
Based in an office building at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA, Brightcove will offer three interrelated online services. It has tools that let television producers load their video onto its servers, arrange them into programs and display them to Internet users. It will help producers charge fees for their video, if they choose, or sell advertising on their behalf to insert into the programs. And it will broker deals between video creators and Web sites that want to display the video, arranging for the profits from such arrangements to be split any number of ways.
Three-dozen production companies are testing the production tools now, and a few have started publishing videos using the tools, the Times said. By early next year, Brightcove said he would have the ad sales and fee systems built and will open its distribution network to nearly any video producer through a Web site.
Brightcove’s business model does not charge video producers anything to upload their video or to create special Web pages. Instead, it plans to make money by taking a cut of the advertising revenue and fees the videos generate. If a producer wants to distribute video with neither ads nor fees, Brightcove will charge them in proportion to how much video users watch.
FCC & Industry Updates
FCC’s Martin signals support for multichannel must-carry
Oct 9, 2005 8:00 AM, Beyond The Headlines e-newsletter
When the issue of multichannel must-carry was before the FCC last February, Kevin Martin was the only one of five commissioners to dissent when the agency — then chaired by Michael Powell — denied the requirement.
Now, Martin is FCC chairman and he is taking cautious steps to support multichannel must-carry for broadcasters, the National Journal reported last week.
In recent weeks, the FCC has issued two reports favoring broadcasters in their disputes with the cable and satellite industries over the issue.
The first of the two FCC reports was issued Aug. 23 — when the commission said satellite companies, DirecTV and EchoStar Communications, must carry all of the multicast digital channels that broadcasters transmit in Alaska and Hawaii. The agency also ruled that the satellite companies must carry their high-definition programs.
That decision applied narrowly to Alaska and Hawaii because of special language in last year’s Satellite Home Viewer Extension and Reauthorization Act (SHVERA). That law requires the two main satellite companies to retransmit all local broadcast signals to almost all subscribers in Alaska and Hawaii within a year. They also must carry local digital signals in those states by June 8, 2007.
Because of capacity limitations on satellite systems, Congress generally has not imposed the same must-carry requirements on satellites as it has on cable. And yet, under SHVERA, the FCC said, “requiring carriage of multicast and high-definition signals most accurately reflects the requirements set forth in the law.”
In the second SHVERA report, issued Sept. 8, the FCC was required to consider the impact of retransmission consent rules on video competition. Retransmission consent is what cable operators must pay to carry the signals of broadcasters who opt out of the must-carry requirement. Stations owned by major networks generally seek retransmission consent. Less popular stations opt for must-carry rules.
Small cable companies chafe against what they regard as excessive broadcaster demands for compensation. Their patience is likely to be tested soon. Oct. 1 marked the beginning of a three-month round of negotiations between broadcasters and cable operators over compensation rates.
Regarding this matter, the FCC said: “If broadcasters are limited in their ability to accept in-kind compensation, they should be granted full carriage rights for their digital broadcast signals, including all free over-the-air digital multicast streams.”
Despite the reports, the Journal said Martin could do little to affect the issue at the FCC, as the question of multicast carriage has become one of the hardest-fought, behind-the-scenes battles in the digital transition debate on Capitol Hill.
Broadcasters have been pushing for the requirement in exchange for accepting a hard date for returning their analog spectrum. Senate Commerce Chairman Ted Stevens, (R-AK) has been silent on the must-carry issue.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee has so far rejected broadcaster demands on the issue. A multicast must-carry requirement “is not going to be part of the base DTV bill, and the prospects for adding it as an amendment in the House are probably pretty dim,” Rep. Fred Upton, (R-MI), chairman of the Telecommunications and the Internet Subcommittee, said late last month.
AZCAR opens shop in Atlanta
Oct 7, 2005 11:24 AM, Beyond The Headlines e-newsletter
Systems integrators and engineering firm AZCAR Technologies has opened a new office in Atlanta, representing the growing company’s third North American operations location.
The Atlanta office will serve as a regional sales and operations base for AZCAR’s media consulting, technology integration and multimedia facility implementation activities.
In addition to the engineering and sales office in Atlanta, AZCAR has added sales professionals in Chicago, Seattle and Los Angeles. All the new personnel were employed by DST, a systems integration company headquartered in Atlanta.
For more information, visit www.AZCAR.com.
Comcast to stream NHL games
Oct 7, 2005 11:31 AM, Beyond The Headlines e-newsletter
National Hockey League fans in the Comcast broadband territory will be able to watch games for free on their PCs this season.
The cable giant announced last week that it will stream free of charge to its 7.7 million subscribers up to two hockey games per night this season. This is the first exclusive agreement that a sports league has made with a broadband provider to stream its games over the Internet.
Major League Baseball offers various paid subscription packages through its MSN Web portal. A live video and audio package can cost about $19.95 a month or $99.95 a season. The National Football League and the National Basketball Association offer audio Webcasts of their games.
Comcast is adding premium content to its portal as it tries to take on lower-priced services from phone companies. While cable still dominates the broadband market, phone companies are closing the gap. In 2004, DSL had about 41 percent of the market, up from 39 percent the year before.
Comcast sees premium content as a way to differentiate itself from the competition. In addition to streaming live hockey games, the company also offers subscribers free access to RealNetworks’ Rhapsody music service.
ARM unveils high-speed processor for mobile devices
Oct 7, 2005 11:46 AM, Beyond The Headlines e-newsletter
British semiconductor designer ARM Holdings has unveiled a new processor that will enable devices such as mobile phones, digital cameras and TVs to achieve processing speeds now only available in computers, Reuters reported.
ARM, which designs processor cores and then lets other semiconductor firms include them in bigger chips, said its Cortex-A8 processor would help double the performance while using the same amount of power, and help run applications such as video, TV and gaming on mobiles.
The company has signed up five licensees for Cortex-A8, and expects products based on the 1GHz processor for mobiles to be shipped out in a few years. Cortex will be for phones hitting the market in 2008 or 2009.
Chipmakers that have licensed the Cortex-A8 include Texas Instruments, Samsung Electronics, Matsushita Electric and Freescale Semiconductor.
Thomson, LG Electronics partner with broadcasters for terrestrial converter boxes
Oct 11, 2005 9:00 AM, Beyond The Headlines e-newsletter
The Association for Maximum Service Television and the NAB have selected LG Electronics and Thomson to each develop prototype low-cost terrestrial digital converter boxes to receive digital signals on conventional analog televisions.
Jointly funded by the MSTV and the NAB with development support from Thomson and LG Electronics, these prototypes will serve as blueprints for future products that help over-the-air viewers continue to receive broadcast TV service when all-digital broadcasting begins.
MSTV President David Donovan said the selection followed an extensive evaluation over the past several months of more than a dozen proposals submitted by electronics and integrated circuit manufacturers from around the world in response to a Request for Quotation released by both organizations June 20.
The selection process had been widely ridiculed by the Consumer Electronics Association, who contended excellent, low-cost converter box designs already exist.
New Products & Reviews
FOX deploys digital archive for 2005 NFL HD broadcasts
Oct 7, 2005 12:45 PM, Beyond The Headlines e-newsletter
FOX Broadcasting has launched a new digital broadcast system co-designed with IBM to transform HD production of the 2005 NFL on FOX season based on a transition of core broadcast infrastructures to standards based technology.
The new digital system will help FOX lower program production costs for its high-definition NFL broadcasts and will enable content from the games to be available on demand for re-purposing and further distribution.
The FOX digital archive solution combines traditional broadcast formats and encoding standards, such as ASI and MPEG, with industry standard technology to give FOX the ability to transmit digitally compressed HD NFL broadcasts easily and transparently from its stadium-based, on-site mobile production trucks directly into a production archive at its Los Angeles studio headquarters.
FOX worked with IBM and Sirius Computer Solutions to design and implement a digital video storage system that allows FOX to manage, store and retrieve broadcast content faster and easier than with conventional production systems and traditional broadcast videotape infrastructure. The FOX digital archive solution is one of the first to integrate with the high-definition Asynchronous Serial Interface (ASI) standard.
The solution features IBM TotalStorage linear tape open (LTO) Ultrium storage technology connected to IBM eServer xSeries systems running Linux.
For more information, visit www.ibm.com, www.siriuscom.com and www.newscorp.com.
Oregon Public Broadcasting deploys Linear Acoustic multichannel audio processor
Oct 7, 2005 2:46 PM, Beyond The Headlines e-newsletter
Linear Acoustic has supplied an OCTiMAX 5.1 digital television audio processor to Oregon Public Broadcasting in Portland for installation at KOPB-HD within its rebuilt master control facilities.
The station will use the OCTiMAX 5.1 system to transmit surround sound audio along with its HD programming, even when sending out two-channel material. In addition to providing multichannel audio processing for the station's SD and HD audio paths, the OCTiMAX 5.1 automatically detects a stereo source and up-mixes it to full 5.1-channel surround.
The OCTiMAX 5.1 digital television audio processor combines multichannel, multiband dynamic processing with audio metadata functionality and local audio insertion capability. An auto voiceover feature allows insertion of voiceover audio, while an integral UpMax 5.1 channel surround-field synthesizer produces 5.1-channel audio from a standard two-channel mix, with full control of center width and surround depth. The resulting signal is also fully mono, stereo and matrix surround downmix compatible.
For more information, visit www.linearacoustic.com.
Merged stations share Omneon server in master control
Oct 7, 2005 2:54 PM, Beyond The Headlines e-newsletter
The duopoly of KVLY-TV 11 (NBC affiliate) and KXJB-TV 4 (CBS affiliate) serving the Fargo and Valley City areas of North Dakota has deployed an Omneon Spectrum media server system for playout from a joint master control room.
The server system, installed to support the merging of KXJB operations into the KVLY facility, provides centralized playout of both channels and handles all content ingest.
The 10-channel server at KVLY/KXJB’s joint Fargo facility operates in conjunction with a Crispin automation system for playout of both channels, as well as ingest of approximately 35 programs and promo feeds each day. The two channels are part of the Wicks Television family of broadcast stations.
For more information, visit www.omneon.com.
Studio Network Solutions offers globalSAN X-4 Pro Tools
Oct 7, 2005 3:01 PM, Beyond The Headlines e-newsletter
The newest addition to the globalSAN family from Studio Network Solutions (SNS), the X-4, is now available.
The X-4 is a compact storage area network (SAN) created for multi-room audio studios that use Digidesign’s Pro Tools digital audio workstations from Avid.
The X-4 is being offered as a complete package that includes 1.6TB of SATA storage in a 1RU enclosure. It contains a single RAID controller and two client licenses of SAN software.
The X-4 was also designed to be stackable, enabling the system to grow with the user as the need arises. The X-4 is based on the iSCSI protocol, which maximizes the performance of Gigabit Ethernet, allowing the X-4 to offer more bandwidth and far greater distance capabilities than USB or FireWire.
For more information, visit www.studionetworksolutions.com.
Dolby unveils encoding/decoding software
Oct 7, 2005 4:15 PM, Beyond The Headlines e-newsletter
At AES, Dolby Laboratories has introduced Dolby Media Producer, a new suite of professional software tools for the new HD and DVD content development industries.
Dolby Media Producer is an encoding and monitoring software tool set for professionals requiring a comprehensive solution in a file-based production environment. The package includes Dolby Media Encoder, Dolby Media Decoder and Dolby Media Tools.
This family of products supports content developed using Dolby technologies, including content in Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD and MLP Lossless formats. These tools support upcoming disc-based media formats such as HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc, as well as DVD-video and DVD-audio and broadcast formats.
Dolby designed the Dolby Media Encoder, built initially on the Mac OS X platform, for use on a local computer or over a network. It has an intuitive user interface and provides metadata for all Dolby formats. Features include project level management, template storage, activity logging and confidence playback.
The Dolby Media Decoder is a software version of Dolby’s DP564 reference hardware decoder and resides on a local computer. Dolby Media Decoder allows the user to listen to an encoded file in the same way a consumer might listen.
For more information, visit www.dolby.com/events/AES2005.
SeaChange outfits China’s first HDTV broadcaster
Oct 7, 2005 4:25 PM, Beyond The Headlines e-newsletter
China’s first high-definition broadcast television service is now on-the-air. China Central Television (CCTV) has launched a channel of sports, movies and other HD programming using video systems by SeaChange International.
CCTV first deployed SeaChange systems in 2004 to launch its 24-channel standard definition television service, which is transmitted globally via satellite. In 2008, CCTV will produce and originate complete Olympics coverage for China and the world.
For more information, visit www.schange.com.
Digidesign shows Pro Tools 7 software at AES
Oct 7, 2005 4:54 PM, Beyond The Headlines e-newsletter
Digidesign used AES2005 to launch Pro Tools 7 software, a new creative environment for its flagship digital audio workstation. The upgrade introduces a comprehensive set of new and enhanced features that expands audio and MIDI recording and editing capabilities.
Pro Tools 7 also offers greater mixing power and flexibility, enhanced efficiency, and improved ease of use. It has support for importing REX and ACID audio files, the introduction of Instrument Tracks, and significant enhancements to looping and track grouping capabilities provide more compositional building blocks.
Enhanced support for multi-processor computers allows operators to use more select RTAS plug-ins and virtual instruments on their sessions while added software optimizations provide a faster, more responsive interface. Pro Tools HD 7, Pro Tools LE 7, and Pro Tools M-Powered 7 software share nearly all of the same new features, giving users easy access to the new Pro Tools creative environment.
The Neyrinck SoundCode for Dolby Digital plug-in suite provides mastering-quality workflow tools that enable the encoding and decoding of Dolby Digital (AC-3) audio directly within Pro Tools software, without the need for dedicated Dolby hardware.
Also, designed for both Digidesign Pro Tools systems and Avid picture systems, the company demonstrated Dynamics III, a fully functional, professional plug-in suite that includes a Compressor/Limiter, Expander/Gate, and D-Esser in a single, processor-efficient interface.
For more information, visit http://www.digidesign.com/.
Devlin Video chooses Snell & Wilcox standards conversion
Oct 7, 2005 5:00 PM, Digital Signage Update e-newsletter
 Devlin will use the new Alchemist Platinum Ph.C at its Times Square facility for HD upconversion and standards conversion of television programming. |
Devlin Video International, a New York City-based post facility, has purchased its second Snell & Wilcox Alchemist Ph.C motion compensated standards converter — this time an Alchemist Platinum Ph.C system with integrated HD upconversion.
The new system will provide transparent standards conversion for its increasing volume of conversion and HD work for broadcasters in the United States and abroad.
Devlin will use the new Alchemist Platinum Ph.C at its Times Square facility for HD upconversion and standards conversion of television programming, documentaries, and full-length feature movies. It also plans to use the system in its DVD authoring service, particularly for work converting international movies from PAL masters to NTSC for distribution in the United States.
Two steps are typically needed to convert 625-line SD PAL sources to a 1080/60 or 720/60 HD NTSC output. First, the video is converted from 625 lines to 525 lines, then it is upconverted to HDTV — and 100 lines of vertical resolution gets lost in the process. With the HD-capable Alchemist Platinum Ph.C, however, both the standard and format conversions are done in a single step. Alchemist Platinum Ph.C thereby preserves an extra 100 lines of vertical resolution that would otherwise be lost, resulting in clearer, sharper HDTV pictures for broadcast and for next-generation HD-DVDs and Blu-ray discs.
For more information, visit www.snellwilcox.com.
