North American Affilliates/Network Set Design

Talked to the engineer at WRAL. Lets just say the cameras (Hitachi) and router (Ross) are 4K ready however the switcher they have is is decently old and probably can only handle 1080p. The series was launched in 2007 but I don't know when they installed it.

They do have a 4K channel on WRAL-EX an ATSC 3.0 experimental channel. 39.1 provides a 1080p version of WRAL and NBC programming (even though everything is 1080i). 39.2 Is a UHD channel that broadcasts a demo loop, some WRAL programming that they produced in 4K along with (at the time) NBC Olympics footage available in 4K.

I assume if they wanted to they could patch a camera to WRAL-EX but it would be useless because it would be without graphics and reports. Additionally there are only a handful of ATSC 3.0 receivers and likely the receivers are in the hands of engineers.

Looking at the previous page, I think it’s fair to say we’re not exactly living in a golden era of US news sets...

WBRE-WYOU - Scranton Pennsylvania. According to Newscaststudio this one done in house by Nexstar. Apparently this a major upgrade for this market. Even the market leading station has a rubbish set.






more at Newscaststudio - https://www.newscaststudio.com/2019/11/04/wbre-wyou-eyewitness-news-new-set/

This is Scranton, Pennsylvania we're talking about, who gave us the first television appearance of Bill O'Reilly. Next to that, anything would be a huge upgrade.

It's quite good for a self design (they probably took designs from earlier commisioned sets) and for the market - Wilkes Barre-Scranton-Hztn is DMA 60. Usually anything under DMA 50 is considered small market.

"Self design" is a bit of a misnomer. Nexstar has an in-house guy that works at corporate that does most of their designs (when a real design firm is not hired). The local station just gets to look at pieces/parts in a catalog and pick out some elements.

AIUI ATSC 3.0 is likely to be using HEVC/h.265 compression for current testing. HEVC can be used for 1080i, but has none of the interlaced optimisations that AVC/h.264 has. As a result you may actually be better off deinterlacing 1080i29.97 to 1080p59.94 prior to HEVC/h.265 encoding (or at least won't hit any major penalties in bitrate/quality terms)

Germany and the Netherlands are using 1080p50 HEVC/h.265 over DVB-T2 terrestrially - though I suspect a lot of the content will be 1080p25 and 1080i25 to 1080p50 deinterlaces. (Germany have ditched SD interlaced entirely from their upgraded DVB-T2 platform - and introduced 540p50 to replace it, alongside 720p50 and 1080p50 modes in their standard. Though 1080i25 may also be supported - there's no real point in using it)

I think wherever possible future TV standards are going to avoid interlaced formats. Next generation encoding either doesn't support interlaced, or just treats the fields as frames (thus ignoring any potential for optimisation and consequent bitrate savings/quality improvements) This also allows you to use a common baseband source for OTT/CatchUp and unicast streaming to mobile devices, OTT set top boxes, PCs etc. - rather than having to deinterlace separately in that workflow.

Before the regular service started there was a test broadcast in Berlin with DVB-T2 and HEVC where they also tested a 1080i broadcast.

Most TVs and set-top-boxes that did have a HEVC decoder couldn't display it, software like VLC thought it was 1920x540 and, as you suspected, at lower bitrates it performed pretty much like 1080p.

(By the way no 720p broadcasts on DVB-T2 in Germany those are also upscaled to 1080p. ZDF already anounced they want to have native 1080p50 and HDR "some time next year).

Interlaced was basically an afterthought in the development of HEVC and was only added in the later revisions.

WMTO 31 Telemundo Orlando FL - Very small set. Interesting that the Weather Center branding is in English rather Centro Meteorológico or something equivalent.





tvnewstalk

WPEC 12 CBS - West Palm Beach, FL (Just north of Miami)
Fairly decent set. Lighting is a bit flat.
This is their old set. A confusing wood and durans mess.

New set. SImple and clean. Large monitor walls.


Not sure why they thought that looks good. But clearly the idea was those 3 screens can be moved and use for other purposed. They could have come up with the better solution than that. Looks clunky withe exposed stands.

Not sure about that local yellow "stone" touch at the bottom. Looks off somehow.
THis is the others side of the set and the bigger standup screen also used for the weather.

The unbranded weather center

More at newscaststudio

Yep - 1080i is included in the German DVB-T2 set-top box/TV reference standard ISTR, 576i is not. (That's the equivalent of our D-book)

https://www.tv-plattform.de/images/stories/pdf/2015_%20minimum%20requirementst2-germany-v1.pdf

Section 5.1 appears to mandate support for :

1080i25, 1080p50, 720p50 and 540p50.



Ah - I guess those TVs weren't tested against the German reference standard, or were built prior to it being ratified? 1080i HEVC is part of the standard and was added prior to ratification. I've played it on a couple of platforms OK. Though it's a pretty pointless thing to do...



Ah - I thought some of the Freenet encrypted stuff was 720p50. I know the shopping stuff is 540p50 (which is the replacement for 576i25)



Yes - it's implemented like the early h.264 interlaced support - which is separated fields (so it's treated as 1920x540p50 effectively in encoding terms) with each interlaced field compressed in intra-field mode only. h.264 added PAFF and MBAFF that allow two interlaced fields to be compressed in the frame domain (either across the whole frame - PAFF - or at a macroblock level - MBAFF) to increase encoder efficiency.

As a result h.265 is far poorer in compression terms with an interlaced source than a progressive source, and for interlaced content offers little advantage over h.264. However deinterlacing 1080i25 to 1080p50 and then compressing is a far better approach and delivers better encodes. Which is presumably what Germany is doing. Chatting to people at ZDF they are still running 1080i25 internally.

(Almost all broadcasters that until recently broadcast only in 720p50 operated internally at 1080i25 and cross-converted on playout. Very few originated anything in 720p50)

I noticed that KMTR, the Sinclair-owned NBC affiliate for Western Oregon, finally left its studios in Springfield and moved in with its sister station, KVAL, in Eugene. They have a new virtual set that may look suspiciously familiar to those of you on the other side of the Atlantic: