 The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company's Spirit of Goodyear blimp use the JVC system to provide HD aerial coverage for every Monday Night Football game where the blimp is employed. |
ABC’s Monday Night Football coverage of the Hall of Fame game made broadcast history Aug. 9, when it became the first telecast ever to transmit high-definition images from a camera mounted in a blimp.
The "Spirit of Goodyear" blimp based in Akron, Ohio, broadcast HD images from the pre-season Hall of Fame game between the Washington Redskins and the Denver Broncos with the help of the JVC DM-JV600U MPEG-2 encoder and DM-D4600U(c) MPEG-2 decoder, working together with a Nucomm microwave system and Ikegami cameras.
In late August, JVC Professional Products reached an agreement with The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company whereby the blimp will use the JVC system to provide HD aerial coverage for every Monday Night Football game where the blimp is employed this season.
As a result, satellite truck operators, production crews and network executives will have the chance to see a live demonstration of a complete HD solution from the "Spirit of Goodyear."
The DM-JV600U is an MPEG-2 encoder that takes the uncompressed HDTV signals from an Ikegami 1080i camera, and compresses them into a 25Mb/s transport stream. The transport stream is then fed to the Nucomm Analog-Coder where it is converted and transmitted to a receiving station on the ground. The microwave signal is then demodulated back to the 25Mb/s transport stream and fed to a production trailer on the ground.
This is done with "The Spirit of Goodyear's" existing analog microwave system. In the trailer, JVC's decoder converts the MPEG-2 data into a 720p feed for ABC's HDTV telecast. The signal is also converted to SD for transmission to ABC's regular feed, enabling non-HD viewers to see shots from the blimp.
ABC began broadcasting select Monday Night Football games in HD during the 1999 NFL season. With the announcement that every 2004-2005 Monday Night Football game will be broadcast in high definition, transmitting HD images from the blimp offers viewers a complete HD viewing experience. For more information, visit www.goodyear.com www.jvc.com/pro.