This will certainly be very costly for the BBC - replacing nearly all equipment for HD. No doubt they will start when they move into Broadcasting House, which I believe will be kitted out with HD facilities. This will mark the start of the HD snowball effect, certainly. Maybe by 2012, the HD revolution may have already started.
How will most people around the world receive the HD channel? Won't they have to get new equipment to view in HD also? Will anyone be interested in watching in HD? It certainly sparks many different questions.
This will no doubt become the future for many other news channels. Sky News HD have broadcast a few times. Several American news channels have HD services. It's certainly an ambitious, brave, but sensible and economically viable plan, which will make sense in the long-run.
Owen Thomas gets a rare week-day programme, presenting with Lucy Hockings this morning. Good to see him with another presenter... very good, as you would imagine.
This will certainly be very costly for the BBC - replacing nearly all equipment for HD. No doubt they will start when they move into Broadcasting House, which I believe will be kitted out with HD facilities.
The cost of the kit is rapidly falling so it may not add a huge amount to the overall cost. Remember everything is being built from scratch, and is expected to be the home of news for the forseeable future, so worth the investment.
However current BBC standards say that no more than 25% of a HD production can be sourced from SD material, this is going to make life interesting for news programmes as there isn't much agency footage in HD around - and the SNG vans and links will need some serious upgrades. I suspect an exemption will have to be made for news, otherwise it won't be economic for many years to come.
BBC News does have a good track record for building relatively future-proofed facilities, often years ahead of their time. Television news moved from film based Alexandra Palace to Television Centre in 1969 to colour studios at Television Centre, adding tape based editing and TX soon after and reducing reliance on film.
The News Centre in Stage VI of TVC was built with widescreen studios and automated server based playout and file sharing. I think News 24 went on air from the 16:9 studios before 16:9 was even transmitted in the UK (I think it started on analogue cable didn't it? A few months before On Digital launched?) Certainly BBC World originated from 16:9 studios and was ARCd to 14:9 Letterbox on 4:3 raster until
very
recently. In the early days of News 24, virtually everything on the News Channel was 4:3 origination and had to be ACRd (often lots of stuff was not ARCd!). I think the BBC was one of the first newsgathering agencies to adopt 16:9 as it's standard acquisition format and in many respects led the way. It was the same in the regions: the older centres were of course PAL 4:3 infrastructure which were botched to 14:9 letterbox when news went 16:9 across the board. Many continued to shoot everything in 4:3, it was just final output that was cropped and zoomed to 14:9. Newer centres like The Forum and The Mailbox were built with 16:9 SDI kit from scratch however and were better prepared. It's only 2 years though since the last 4:3 regions switched to proper 16:9 broadcasting (the last being Bristol, Plymouth/Jersey, Southampton/Oxford - though I can't remember in what order!) AIUI, Pacific Quay's news studio is HD ready, the first in the UK.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if the studios at BH are HD from the start. As a previous poster noted, the cost of kit is rapidly falling and lots of stuff is HD/SD switchable anyway. It may take many years for any notable amount of news material to be shot in HD and whether The News Channel will end up being transmitted in HD remains to be seen, but it's sensible of the BBC to ensure that its prepared.
By the time you read this I'll be back, but right now I'm in Crete, staying in a place whose satellite TV system offers about 10bn channels, approximately 100% of which aren't in English. OK, so you can pick up the BBC World TV news channel, but no one's ever willingly watched that for longer than nine minutes. It's a channel whose viewer demographic consists exclusively of men sitting on the edge of a hotel bed impatiently waiting for their girlfriend to finish in the shower so they can go and have a sh*t.
AIUI, Pacific Quay's news studio is HD ready, the first in the UK.
Yeah, Reporting Scotland is produced in HD, although report footage is upscaled from SD. Graphics and studio cameras are all HD. The gallery output is then downscaled to SD for transmission.
