Session 2: THE TECHNOLOGY SESSION
Leif Hedman (SVT): We see around us a pretty amazing display of technology we have big screens we have projectors we have cameras you have wireless cameras, you have sound equipment and we are connected to the whole world with satellite feeds. Of course we have spoken a lot about the digital revolution in the last few years and the effect it has had on the way that we do television and the way the we get the story out from a place of conflict. But this is 2003 and television was not started in 2003 it was started, when was it Ken, 1953, I believe? Why don't you tell us all about it? Ken Tiven is a guy who makes and creates TV stations and news programmes for a living and he's been around for a while as have I. But put us into context where are we in the evolution?
 Ken Tiven (Intelligent Media Consultants): Well it's good to get an audience like this and I'll do my best to make this mercifully brief and entertaining. I do want to put in a plug that it there is a great deal more to getting television news out than just the mechanics. Television news is all about context and you have to have the right stories and nothing that sometimes we get preoccupied with sending something back without necessarily sending back something that people really want to see. So please, a plug for producers, reporters, cameramen, editors, the team it takes to gather the news. Intelligent Media Consultants is a couple of guys who wander around helping people build television stations and we have spent a lot of time trying to harness new technologies on behalf of television journalism. We thing that good journalism can be enhanced by a good technology but technology by itself will never create suitable journalism. Much of what was said this morning in the coverage from the Iraq war demonstrates how we have gotten very good at getting it back. Sometimes we don't get back what we want, there was a comment made by Mark this morning that it didn't go smoothly. Well, it never goes smoothly! If it went smoothly it would be radio, I don't mean to denigrate radio but television has always been brutally difficult and I thought just as her precursor to some of the discussion I would hopscotch through a few years of what went on. If you go back 50 years an American network in 1953 leased an airplane with a film processor installed on it in order to fly back Coronation of Queen Elizabeth film, get it processed and delivered to an American audience technically within the same day
In 1963, the assassination of President Kennedy was all film, Walter Cronkite and anchor people in studios, when you when live you rolled out big cameras and OB trucks and it took an act of Congress to actually do that and then buy a line from the video company AT&T to get the pictures back. Networks in those days in America, the BBC did it set piece life coverage. In the Sixties and Seventies it was all film. The film flown to some place and developed, ultimately in the late Sixties and the early Seventies it could be satellite delivered. For those of you don't remember in 1973 a mini-cam weighed about 80 kilograms between the camera the backpack and the peripherals and took a small army to run. It's all changed in the Seventies. The videotape, live cameras, first microwave and then satellite trucks and as KU band and satellite trucks came into real use we could get material back real-time basis. CNN exists because Ted Turner felt that people would watch news if it was on and the emergence of videotape and live transmission capabilities actually made its possible to build a 24 hour news channel. Now why it took Ted Turner to do it when ABC, NBC, CBS, the BBC, ARD and lot of other big broadcasters couldn't figure it out has to do with the issue of people who don't know how difficult it is taking on the challenge. Frequently the problem in this business is the people who have the skills are afraid. I think that as we get down now to the point that important is the battle to get material back and were not talking about obviously driving 30 kilometres to do a story in your home town. We are talking about global news gathering. The issue with a global news gathering is that it's always difficult to get it back whether it's dealing with the authorities, whether it's carrying suitcases of money around like we used to and bribing up-link technicians in places like Iran, Cuba, Africa, Europe, every place. Today you might as well bribe the IT technician at the hotel to show you where there is actually a 2megabit dataline so that you can get things out. I think that the getting out issue today is trying to harness the ingenuity of of IT people and producers and reporters using laptops and small cameras and a different kind of technology basically what bandwidth is there and how can we use it to get these stories shipped back? There are just enormous advances in compression technologies and in all kinds of things. There is no simple answer, the video phone is not a video phone it is a group of components put together by various people. There is no single technology. The great change, the great opportunity that has come to us is that in the transition from analogue to digital the manipulation of things can now take place in various small boxes in the same room in which you edit the piece.
You can condense it to a little quick time movie and e-mail the quick time movie back. You might have to in some cases actually e-mail each shot back and hope that they'll get there. But all of these kind of things are being done and you have to draw some distinction between feeding live material back and and being able to feed some material back that doesn't require live real-time technology. So the funny answer to this as you think about it is that everybody has to be willing to sign a chit for another $3000 laptop and another box from some company that so obscure that nobody in purchasing as ever heard of it and that the kids who want to experiment get to do it because I think that the days in which, the days when we would ship three or 4000 kilo load of C-band satellite gear and three technicians to go and sit on a hillside for three weeks is over. Those economies of scale have completely shifted so in a sense from a news managers perspective the good news is as we all run out of money we all find cheaper news solutions that a more fitting to the economies of this decade than they were to the Eighties and Nineties. Certainly no one is shipping briefcases with a $150,000 in crisp 100 dollar bills around any more like we once did. Leif has a much better look at the exact technology but I would say that some of the tests we have done with i-chat between Macintoshes is quite amazing, 3 G telephone stuff quite amazing, tons of bandwidth floating around the world which is available but you have to know where to find it and you have to know how to do something with it but the challenge over next year's is not to make it work smoothly but to keep pushing how much you can do so that it's always on the ragged edge. So that information and content can be brought back to centralised transmission points and some coherence can be created out of it. It's an interesting comment that's if coverage of a war like Alessio said, the last guy to tell you what happened is the guy that was there. If you have a little slice of the story and you have enough slices then you can build a pizza that looks like a pizza. And that's really the challenge of how to use the new technology to get back enough depth, enough slices so that in fact the story that we struggle to get out his story that makes the difference to the people that see it.
Leif Hedman: I'm going to show you a film, it's all about getting the story out. In case you don't know when people talk about store and forward then it's the thing that you have shot with a camera and stored the material on a computer and you have forwarded it back to your newsroom. That's what they mean. Okay let's roll the tape and we'll see if we get any questions afterwards?
(runs videotape)
Leif Hedman: This is today but there are problems facing us very very soon. You see these screens alongside the room, that's the sort of stuff you will have in your own homes within a few years. Already tody if you have one of these and you rent a DVD disc and watch a feature film on it, it looks great. But if you were to then switch to ordinary television it would look like crap! And that is a problem that television companies are facing and the Japanese have already tackled the problem. Mr Yoshida could you tell us about HD television?
Kei Yoshida (NHK): Thank you very much for your kind introduction. Hello everyone. Today I would like to tell you about the HD newsgathering of NHK, because of our tight schedule I shall move on in a hurry.We have four points, the first one is the introduction of our network of HD - High Definition, and I will introduce you some statistics which show our newsgathering activities. And thirdly I will show you some video footage which was shot in August in Baghdad. And I will make two points regarding the merit of HD.
So the first part is about our HD network. This is a US Japan HD network consisting mainly of sub-marine fibre-optics. The bit radius 16 megabits is very huge. The second network is regarding Europe, we have three different uplink stations which is London, Paris and Moscow and the main part is satellite circuit, 36 megaHertz. In my home region, Asia we have four uplink stations, Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai and Bangkok, we use Japanese domestic satellite, 27 megaHertz, four circuits. This shows the technical requirements that I classify into four parameters. The first is basement signal which requires a huge capacity of circuits 1.5 gigabits. The next one is, ordinary transmission, bandwidth is 27-54 and a rather economical scale, half scale. The required bandwidth is 18. And the last one, strictly speaking this is not defined as HD but because we down-convert HD into D1SDI with the same aspect ratio but the merit is the small bandwidth, approximately 9 megaHertz and ts rate 7-16 megabit. And this graph shows you our international contribution news-gathering to the whole amount of international contributions. We launched HD broadcasting in December 2000 and in the first year the average is very low but the next year grows smoothly. And this year almost half of our international contribution was made through the HD format and as you can easily see that in this winter the average is above 50% which is caused by the Iraq war. This diagram represents our HD network during the Iraq war, we added two circuits to already dedicated HD circuits, which is Jordan and Qatar. And after the Iraq war our HD camera crew moved into Baghdad and shot several historical moment. I would like to show some footage.
(runs videotape)
So lastly I would like to make clear the merit of HD news-gathering. It's very simple, we have two merits here, the first is to grab a moment of history in clear vision and the second to preserve it for the future. I guess that in Europe or any other country HD will become a mass market in the near future. If my guess is right there are many things we can colaborate on for achieving better visual journalism. Thank you for your attention.
Leif Hedman: And now comes the moment you've all been waiting for it's lunchtime.
Transcript by Tony Callaghan
Photo Credits: Piotr Azia, EBU; Balint Eder, Brill Productions; and Mark Milstein, North Foto
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