By James Careless
The satellite offices of the major news conglomerates are on the front line for regional, live news coverage that gets global exposure. Today, however, advanced equipment and services requirements from broadcasters who rely on satellite-enabled technology to get the news out are changing.
Now more than ever, TV network affiliates depend on satellites to deliver live, on-the-spot news coverage for their local and regional viewers. How these affiliates use satellites varies. Some stations run their satellite news gathering (SNG) operations as independent in-house units while others work through their parent ownership groups to share bandwidth and ground station equipment.
Either way, TV affiliates have embraced SNG as a key weapon in the war for viewers, ratings points and advertising revenues. This is why so many stations are operating in digital transmission mode, with some uplinking multiple video feeds to their home stations. However, even the most advanced of TV affiliates are now requiring more from their satellite service providers as high-definition and IPTV loom on the horizon.
SNG Pulls Belo's WWL-TV Through Katrina, But Belo Wants More
When Hurricane Katrina hammered New Orleans, Belo Corp's CBS affiliate, WWL-TV, was the only TV station that stayed on air. (Belo owns 19 TV stations affiliated with various national networks.) Proper planning was the reason WWL-TV was able to continue broadcasting. Long before Katrina hit, the station had built an analog/digital TV transmission site in Gretna, La., 18 feet above sea level. Add a transmitter structure built to withstand a Category 5 hurricane, an on-site emergency studio, plus a backup generator with large fuel storage tanks, and WWL-TV had what it needed to weather Katrina's wrath. The WWL-TV transmitter emergency studio is pretty small. Mindful of this, WWL-TV struck a deal with Louisiana State University's Manship School of Mass Communication in Baton Rouge to use LSU's facilities during a disaster. When Katrina shut down WWL-TV's French Quarter studios, the news staff moved to LSU. Some days later, they moved to PBS affiliate WPBL-TV in Baton Rouge and started working from its even-larger, broadcast-standard studios. At press time, WWL-TV's news staff was still there.
To get WWL-TV's signal from Baton Rouge to the station's Gretna transmission site, Belo called in SNG trucks from its Dallas ABC affiliate, WFAA, and its CBS affiliate, KHOU, in Houston. Since then, "the SNG truck, which can uplink three digital satellite channels simultaneously, has been serving as the STL [studio-transmitter link] between Baton Rouge and WWL-TV's transmitter," says Johnny Stigler, WFAA's Electronic News Gathering (ENG) supervisor. "During the hurricane itself, we actually uplinked the Ku-band signal up to CBS New York, which then turned it around on C-band to Gretna. This made sure that the signal cut through the rain. Once it cleared, we were able to do a direct link using Ku-band." Rick Barber, WWL-TV's director of engineering, coordinated getting all the equipment in place to allow the station to continue broadcasting, Stigler says.
Together with SNG trucks from other Belo-owned affiliates in Texas, WFAA's SNG truck not only provides an STL lifeline for WWL-TV, but voice, data and supplementary video feed channels for this station and other Belo staff. Yet despite all this capacity, Belo wants more; specifically more digital signal compression at the uplink end, so that more channels can be squeezed into the same satellite bandwidth.
"Today in digital SNG, we typically need 5.5 megahertz to get out a single MPEG-2 channel," says WFAA RF Engineer Kelly Moore. "With a 54-megahertz satellite transponder we can send out 10 digital channels. But if MPEG-4 compression technology becomes affordable at some point in time, we could double the number of digital channels we uplink on the same bandwidth. This is critically important, because there are times during the news day when everyone wants to get on the satellite at the same time, and we just don't have enough channels available to carry them all. This is why we need more compression, and we need it now."
Belo is not the only TV broadcast group worried about insufficient satellite bandwidth. The same concern is shared by Martin Faubell, vice president of engineering for Hearst Argyle Television. The company owns 28 TV stations with affiliations with all of the major U.S. commercial TV networks and has 24 SNG trucks using 36 MHz of spectrum leased from Intelsat on the just-launched IA-8 satellite. "Broadcasters are relinquishing terrestrial microwave bandwidth to the U.S. government, which is currently used for intercity microwave news links," Faubell says. "When this bandwidth is gone, satellite demand will likely increase. This adds to the need for improved digital compression [and] additional channels."
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