Building Tomorrow's DTV Facility Today: A Real World Case Study

Broadcasters renovating old facilities or building new facilities today face a daunting number of unknowns. There seem to be more questions and unknowns than answers. Will the facility provide “pass-through” capability of the HDTV compressed network signal? Will the station provide multicasting on a full or part time basis? If multicasting is desired, how many channels and at what quality level? How will the station cope with multichannel distribution and master control operations? — This paper will present a case study of two television stations currently undergoing major renovations that are being designed with HDTV pass-through and multicasting in mind. Approaches to floor plans, monitoring, master control, signal distribution, and production will be presented. The focus of the discussion will be to highlight design considerations that provide for a facility that is as “future proofed” as possible. — The case study will focus on two network affiliate middle market stations that cannot defer major technical renovations for a variety of business and technical reasons. Without the luxury of waiting for better definition of the broadcast landscape in the next decade, these stations will incorporate designs that acknowledge that change and refocusing will occur in the next few years. — This paper's goal is to bring into sharp focus the practical and implementable measures that broadcasters can use today to ready their facilities for the transition to DTV.

Published

1997-11

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/M00246

ISBN

978-1-61482-928-7