This season, for the first time, Fox Sports will air all of its Major League Games in high-definition. With 72 regular season games over 26 Saturdays, as well as the National League Championship Series, the World Series, and the All Star Game, that marks a major expansion of their HD production. But as the Fox Group’s president of engineering Andy Setos explains, the transition has been relatively painless, thanks to the company’s early embrace of going all HD. An edited transcript follows:
Q: How does the move to producing all of your MLB games in HD fit in with Fox’s overall HD efforts.
A: Doing all the games in HD was part of the plan all along. Ever since we hit the ground running back in September 2004, doing six NFL games that season in HD, we’ve said two things: First, TV is HDTV. It is as inseparable from TV experience as color is. HD isn’t a novelty and a stunt the way it might have been considered 10 years ago.
Second, given that fact, we’ve always been very focused on what we call sustainable models.
We were very much against the early approaches that were taken in HD, especially in the context of sports coverage. In the early days of HD, you’d have two separate productions. One for analogue SD and one for HD, where everything was different -- different cameras, different camera angles, etc. The entire game was different.
We thought that was grotesquely impractical on many levels, including costs. It is hard enough to produce one superb game. And yet people were trying to do two.
Even as recently as the last Olympics, NBC did side by side productions and it wasn’t very satisfactory.
So, we’ve always focused on a sustainable way of doing it. We’ve worked to satisfy both analog and HD viewers. We respect them equally; they are part of our viewing audience. For the longest time, there will be plenty of analog viewers. We need to be mindful of those and we can’t turn our backs on them. That wouldn’t be good for viewers, the sport or Fox.
Q: What has that meant in terms of your facilities and upgrading your operations?
A: When we started in 2004, the broadcast network from a content standpoint was immediately all HD. When we presented this to management, the idea was that they would not have to ask or be concerned about our ability to transmit to our affiliates.
All our affiliates got our HD distribution gear when they were ready to go to digital HD.
That number has growing from September of 2004 to today, when all but a very few are passing on the satellite signal we offer.
And by the way, we don’t have a side by side satellite system either. We never did. Some others still do that, but we stopped that a long time ago.
So, in terms of our play-out facility, from the time it enters the Fox Network Center in Los Angeles to when it sent up to the satellite again, it has been all HD for three and half years. Whether we produced six games or all the games or no games, it wouldn’t matter.
In 2006, to offer our clients maximum flexibility, we began offering our clients the possibility that every advertising unit could be played in HD during any daypart. We were the first to do that. It is very complicated in terms of trafficking but again it is part of the all HD attitude. Not only will the games be in HD, our commercial advertisers will be able to display their wares and send their message in the best possible way.
Right now more than half of the units we play in fox are delivered to us in HD. This last Super Bowl all but two commercials were in HD.
The next part it getting the signal from the ballpark to the network center. We have been a pioneer for using fiber for sports backhaul for years, which is something we actually started with the NFL. Everyone else had been using satellite up until then.
One benefit is that it allows us to expand more rapidly and gives us more flexibility. We don’t have to use satellite for any backhaul unless we’re working from a cornfield somewhere.
We have been working closely with our supplier of that service, which is Level 3 Communications to up upgrade the circuits form SD to HD at all the ball parks. And, we are there. We no longer have to concern ourselves with that element of it.
The last part is the mobile units we hire. Like everyone else, we don’t happen to own those mobile units anymore but we have worked with our vendors and given them fair notice.
The good news is that SD equipment, high end SD equipment, really isn’t available any more. It is not something that people want to invest in investment in because you have to milk this equipment for five, ten years to get your value out of it.
So the only thing being bought today, being built today, is HD, which makes it much easier to get HD production facilities.
Q: So you are not looking at a lot of incremental costs for doing more games in HD?
A: It becomes increasingly difficult to make this comparison. Ten years ago HD production equipment and fiber circuits were frightfully expensive. But standard def equipment will be in short supply on NAB floor in April. In 18 month, the comparison will be moot.
Today we no longer buy SD equipment. No part of fox buys SD equipment. Even if there is a small premium over SD, you would only be able to amortize SD equipment over three years versus say seven for HD.
When you look at the kind of top of the line SD equipment we used to buy, maybe there is a 15% or 20% premium. But those numbers are reasonably small when you think about the total cost of production. So it is not really something that blips our budgets.
The important point is that we’ve always looked at HD not as a stunt but mainstream television. There was a time when color used to be a stunt or when replays were considered stunts and then they became part of mainstream television.
With HD and all of these things you have to have an understanding of how you can make them mainstream or you are going to disappoint viewers. When you give them a taste of something, they expect it on a regular basis and if they don’t get it, they’ll be disappointed. We don’t want to disappoint our viewers and fans.
