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"An HD Ballgame"

Since its premiere on Sept. 6, 2001, HDNet has built an impressive high-def library, including many hours of sports programming. During this year’s Major League Baseball season, HDNet is scheduled to broadcast 80 games live in HD. Courtesy of HDNet.

WALKING THROUGH THE AISLES of Circuit City, Phil Garvin goes
unrecognized as he makes his way to the home theater department. It's a
familiar trek for Garvin, who regularly visits electronics stores to
stay current on the price and selection of high-definition television
sets. As he lingers through the high-def inventory, he invariably
commands the attention of the sales staff, if only because of his keen
interest in some of store's most expensive items.

“They get pretty excited when you ask questions,” says
Garvin, who often quizzes the staff as a way of informally monitoring
HD sales trends. “But after a while they finally realize that I'm
not going to buy anything and want to know why I'm asking so many
questions. I tell them I'm involved with HDNet, and then they get all
excited and say ‘HDNet is an important part of how we sell this
stuff.’ And then they ask me, ‘Do you know Mark
Cuban?’”

Cuban, of course, is the billionaire owner of the National
Basketball Association's Dallas Mavericks. He made his fortune in 1999
at age 43 when Yahoo! forked over $5.7 billion for his Internet startup
Broadcast.com, immediately making him the poster child for the Internet
boom of the late '90s. Since purchasing the Mavericks in 2000 for $280
million, Cuban's many made-for-television exploits have only added to
his notoriety, making him one of the most recognized and entertaining
personalities in the sports world.

Most recently, Cuban has become the face of HDNet, the all-HD
channel he and Garvin launched in September 2001 on DirecTV Channel
199. Cuban appears dozens of times each HDNet broadcast day during
various promotional spots that alternately hype the network's upcoming
programming and ask viewers to request HDNet at their local sports
bars. He even has a sports talk show, The Mark Cuban Show, that
is broadcast in Dallas in standard def, and in high def on HDNet.

If Cuban is the face of HDNet, Garvin is the technical mastermind of
the network. As general manager and COO, Garvin oversees the network's
production from a small, abandoned airport in western Denver. He began
his broadcast career in 1973 as a producer/director/cameraman at WGBH,
the PBS affiliate in Boston. In 1983, he moved to Denver to establish
the western production center, which he now calls Colorado Studios, for
PBS' long-running The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour, now known as
The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. In 1994, he teamed with Fox Sports
to open Mountain Mobile, a production company that provides mobile
broadcast trucks for sports telecasts in the Colorado area. Five years
later, Garvin partnered with Fox again to form Mountain Mobile's sister
company, Lone Star Mobile, to serve Texas-based sports teams. Not long
after, Lone Star Mobile trucks began showing up at Mavericks home
games, and it was only a matter of time before Cuban's pioneering
spirit would combine with Garvin's technical know-how to form the
world's first all-HD network.

Philip Garvin, left, looks on as Glenn Moore monitors the live telecast of an Anaheim Angels and Pittsburgh Pirates game from HDNet’s broadcast center in Denver. Photo: Cody Holt.

“I couldn't take my eyes off of it,” says Cuban,
recalling the first time he watched a high-definition broadcast.
“I bought a set and had DirecTV, and I found myself watching
their HD loops over and over again, which meant I was [either] a very
strange individual or there was something special about HD.”

Intrigued by his discovery, Cuban approached Fox Sports in June 2000
with the idea of televising Mavericks home games in HD. Fox brought
Garvin in to meet with Cuban, and soon the notion of broadcasting a few
games in high def mushroomed.

“Working with Mark's initial push to do something in high def,
I came up with the concepts that dealt with the challenge of doing high
def at a reasonable cost from both a technology and a production point
of view, and with an approach that could lead to a wider acceptance of
high definition,” Garvin says. “And that was
HDNet.”

About a year later — on Sept. 6, 2001 — HDNet became the
world's only national network broadcasting all high-definition content.
It is available at no extra charge to DirecTV customers with an
HDTV-capable television and an HDTV-capable DirecTV receiver.
Broadcasting 16 hours a day, seven days a week in 1080i, HDNet's
programming is a mix of live and taped shows, including concerts,
documentaries, music videos, movies, and sporting events. During the
current Major League Baseball season, HDNet is scheduled to broadcast
80 games live in HD. It also has broadcast agreements with the National
Hockey League, National Lacrosse League, and Arena Football League. In
February, HDNet teamed up with NBC to produce high-def broadcasts of
the 2002 Winter Olympics, which were available on NBC's DTV affiliates
as well as HDNet.

In its short, two-year history, HDNet has become the world's
foremost high-def broadcaster, having amassed the largest HD library of
sports and entertainment programming to date. While the network and its
programming continue to evolve, Garvin and Cuban made most of the
critical decisions about the network before its debut.

“Between July 2000 and September 2001, we had to come up with
all the pieces that are HDNet,” says Garvin, noting that there
was no model for many of the decisions he and Cuban had to make since
high-def broadcasting had previously been an event-based endeavor.
HDNet would soon change that. “One of the first things we decided
was ‘Let's not mess around with doing a few events in high def.
Let's start a full-blown network so we'll have the opportunity, after
spending a lot of money on a bunch of production, to actually have a
functioning, profitable network.’”

After the decision was made to start a network, the next question
was “Where do we get the content?” Sporting events were an
obvious answer because of Garvin's association with Mountain Mobile and
Lone Star Mobile and Cuban's association with the Mavericks. But the
problem with covering live sporting events in HD was the production
costs.

In 1999, ABC broadcast a number of its Monday Night Football
games and the 2000 Super Bowl in HD (see “Immaculate
Reception,” March 2000). While the broadcasts were considered
significant milestones in high-def history, they came at a considerable
price. “It was my understanding that ABC was spending well into
six figures to do a single Monday Night Football game in high
def,” Garvin says. “Everyone understood that we couldn't do
that. We had to figure out a way to do production in high def with
significantly reduced costs.”

To do this, Garvin began by streamlining the broadcast truck. First,
he struck a deal with Fox Sports that would allow HDNet to piggyback
audio and graphics from Fox's SD trucks. The HDNet truck would be
equipped to upconvert the graphics, but not create them, and digitize
and get surround sound out of the audio, but not capture it.
(Incidentally, DirecTV does not currently broadcast HDNet with 5.1
surround sound, although the HDNet trucks are equipped to produce
it.)

Next, Garvin turned his attention to the cameras. He purchased 10
Sony HDW-900/950 and six HDW-700 high-def cameras and equipped them
with Canon HD lenses — there are five cameras assigned to each of
HDNet's two mobile trucks. But even in the new cameras, Garvin saw room
for improvement. Being SMPTE fiber-based, the Sony cameras required a
type of cable that did not exist in most of the major league sports
arenas and stadiums and is extremely expensive to purchase and install.
So Garvin contacted Sony's Japanese engineers, who eventually told him
how he could modify the cameras and CCUs to work with cheaper,
single-mode fiber, and soon after HDNet began running fiber in sports
facilities around the country. To date, the network has installed
single-mode fiber in 26 venues.

After Garvin and his engineers figured out a way to get the HD
signals back to the truck in a more efficient and economical way, they
tackled the problem of getting the video and audio from the truck to
HDNet's Denver broadcast center. Garvin's first instinct was to call
Vyvx, which he had worked with countless times in the past on any
number of the 1,500 sporting events he's responsible for each year. But
because of the digital requirements of a high-def backhaul, Vyvx could
only promise its services to three stadiums in six months. To put a DS3
path in all of the stadiums and arenas that HDNet planned to visit, it
would take two years. There wasn't time.

Reluctantly, Garvin began calling uplink companies, which he didn't
want to use because of the expense of satellite time. Again, he had
trouble finding anyone who could provide services to accommodate his
high-def signals. Faced with this major setback, Garvin did what any
maverick would do. He rewrote the rules.

“I decided that our uplink was going to be part of our truck,
so we designed a truck with a built-in uplink,” he says.
“There's the production trailer, then there's the tractor, and
the back of the tractor has an uplink on it. So when our production
truck arrives, it arrives with an uplink that disconnects from the
production trailer and rolls around to a good spot to hit the bird. We
designed it all from scratch. There is nothing standard about
it.”

In the HDNet mobile production truck, an encoder system compresses the HD footage, and then the truck’s built-in satellite uplink sends that signal to HD Master Control, where commercials will be inserted as un-decoded MPEG video and then broadcast. Photo: Tony Donaldson.

The HDNet broadcast center is housed in the business-jet terminal of
the old Stapleton Airport, a small, executive airstrip that closed in
1995. Garvin became the first tenant after the runways went silent, and
now occupies the terminal and an adjacent hangar — perfect for
housing and servicing his eight mobile broadcast trucks. The two
buildings total 85,000 square feet of office and studio space, and are
set in the middle of seven acres of flat prairie land. A few hundred
yards away, beyond a sea of concrete and a chain-link fence, an indoor
skating facility operates out of another hangar.

A sign at the entrance to the Colorado Studios complex, which Garvin
has named Colorado Studios like the facilities company that shares the
terminal building with HDNet, announces the other tenants: Mountain
Mobile; The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, still a regular client of
Colorado Studios; Barbizon Lighting, which operates a showroom and
warehouse in Garvin's hangar; and Channel 8, Denver's municipal cable
channel. But there is no mention of HDNet.

Still, in less than one year HDNet has become the focal point of
Colorado Studios, now 19 years old. The network's master control room
overwhelms the main lobby of the terminal building. Featuring several
high-def monitors and computer screens, master control is a wonderland
of cutting-edge technology. Ironically, in a room full of beautiful
high-def images, the two most important pieces of equipment are also
the most understated. The first is a Harmonics Divicom encoder.

Since uncompressed 1080i HD requires an unbearable 1.4Gbps of
throughput, one of the first decisions Garvin and his engineers made
when building the master control room was to compress all of their HD
footage to 19.4Mbps, which is the rate at which it reaches DirecTV
subscribers. “We decided that everything in our world — and
this was another huge cost savings — was going to operate in this
compressed format,” Garvin says. “Be it at the truck or
after we edit a program, once it is done and ready for master control,
it was going to be compressed down to 19.4Mbps. Our plan was to encode
and never decode back to baseband and re-encode. So that's what we do.
We use the encoder to compress, and we never uncompress.”

Working this way does two important things: It avoids the quality
hit that comes from continually encoding and decoding the high-def
footage, and it lessens the bandwidth requirements in both the truck
and master control since no footage is ever transmitted or stored at
more than 19.4Mbps. However, there is one caveat to this production
model. Once the footage is compressed, it can never be fed to a
switcher or cut. To switch between signals in the compressed format,
Garvin needed an MPEG splicing-based broadcast center with a server
that could meet the storage requirements of high-def video. For once he
didn't have to special order anything; he got exactly what he was
looking for in one box from Sencore.

The Sencore server — truly the heart of HDNet's master control
— has a built-in MPEG splicer. The system has 550GB of storage in
a RAID 5 redundant-array configuration. The server's software also has
playlist functionality developed by EVS that allows the master control
operator to build each day's programming schedule on a desktop
computer.

“The entire broadcast day comes out of that server,”
Garvin says. “Whenever we edit a show here, the first thing we do
is compress it, and put it up on the server. Then we put all of our
spots and promos on there, all in MPEG. When we transmit from the truck
we compress to 19.4Mbps before we uplink. It comes into the server,
gets combined with the other elements, and then we take it out via DS3
fiber to DirecTV in L.A. It's one high-tech broadcast center. Very
economical, too.”

From start to finish, Garvin estimates that he has taken 80% of the
cost out of HD production. “Mark's challenge to me was to figure
out a way to do HD without spending the kind of money that had been
spent in the past,” Garvin says. “I don't really know that
we slashed 80% of the costs of running a whole HDTV network because
there wasn't one before us. But I do know that we're doing it really
smart.”

Camera operators often have a learning curve when shooting for HDNet. They often depart from the general rules of shooting standard to take advantage of the wider, clearer images. Photo: Tony Donaldson.

Rachael Weaver is usually one of the first people to arrive at HDNet
in the morning. As on-air producer, she likes to be there when the
network signs on at 8 a.m. Mountain Time. It's her job to schedule the
first program, as well as all of the subsequent programs and promos
that make up an HDNet broadcast day. She has an ever-expanding list of
high-def shows to choose from, but still she has to repeat most
programs at least a few times a week to fill out her schedule. After a
show has been in rotation for three or four weeks, she usually pulls it
from the schedule, if only for a while until she needs it or feels
enough time has passed to make it fresh again.

“We have a single feed for the whole country, so I typically
don't schedule things at exactly the same time every day. Number one,
our live elements like our baseball games vary [in duration], so I have
to schedule around them,” Weaver says. “I also vary the
timeline so that the East Coast, as well as the West Coast and every
point in between, has the best opportunity to see a show, especially
the new ones.”

With the debut of a new show, such as a weekly HDNet World
Report, HDNet may broadcast it twice in the same evening —
once for East Coast viewers and later for West Coast viewers.
“Then during the rest of the week I will vary it throughout the
day and evening,” she says. “It doesn't get played multiple
times [each day], but maybe twice a day.”

In addition to keeping tabs on the program schedule, Weaver is also
the unofficial watchdog of the HDNet postproduction cycle. From her
windowed office just outside of master control, she keeps tabs on the
various programs and promotional spots as they move through the editing
rooms. Although she generally knows the status of most projects, she
has no real authority over any of her co-workers. That's the Colorado
Studios style.

“We operate on a flat management system. There is no reporting
structure, and there are no supervisors,” says Garvin, noting
that each employee of Colorado Studios and HDNet reports to him.
“It works really well, especially if you understand that there
will be some chaos from time to time.”

Part of the reason the system is so successful is because Garvin has
surrounded himself with experienced video production professionals,
many of whom have worked for him for 10 years or more. Weaver is one of
the few exceptions; she's been with HDNet for one year.

On the other hand, Todd Mueller, the lone computer graphics artist
for both HDNet and Colorado Studios, has worked for Garvin for 16
years. Charles Minow, an Avid editor who uses Apple Final Cut Pro
running on Pinnacle's CineWave HD board to edit high-def programs for
HDNet, started at Colorado Studios in 1993.

But there may be some new faces at HDNet very soon. This fall, Cuban
and Garvin are planning to introduce three new HDNet channels —
HDNet Sports, which will feature live and taped sporting events, with
the goal of broadcasting 365 live events each year; HDNet Movies, which
will showcase feature films converted from 35mm widescreen; and HDNet
Entertainment, which will feature music videos, concerts,
documentaries, and episodic television shows converted from 35mm film.
All three channels, as well as the original channel on DirecTV, will
broadcast 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Just as important, the three new channels will be distributed via
cable operators as well as DirecTV. Garvin envisions cable operators
offering their subscribers a tier of HD programming consisting of the
three HDNet channels: Discovery HD, Showtime HD, and HBO HD. He
estimates that cable subscribers may be asked to pay anywhere from $9
to $19 for this service.

“What we want is a lot of people out there with high-def
receivers and TVs in their homes,” says Garvin, noting that HD
set sales are difficult to track but currently there are an estimated 2
million high-def monitors in U.S. homes.

While Garvin admits that probably 90% of those aren't equipped to
receive HDTV signals, he says with more programming options that number
could skyrocket. “The more choice they have, the more people will
go out there and become high-def viewers, creating more high-def homes.
More high-def homes is good for us.”

In addition to the three new channels, Garvin is working on the
concept for a mobile production truck that could simultaneously
broadcast in SD and HD with one director and technical director, two
switchers, but only one control panel. Although he doesn't expect to
have the truck engineered by the end of the year, you can bet it'll be
on the road sometime next year. And Garvin will be along to enjoy the
ride.

“How many people get to do this?” he asks. “We're
using technology that's there — it's not like we're inventing the
technology — but we are shaping the use of the technology in a
way maybe that hasn't been done before. It's a gas.”

WHILE DIRECTING A MID-SUMMER baseball game at Dodger Stadium between
the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays — broadcast
nationally on DirecTV — HDNet producer/director Mike Fox leans
over his console inside HDNet's crisp, new HD mobile production truck
and confesses his secret.

“I'm cheating,” he says in a conspiratorial whisper.

Fox then describes his “crime” — airing a shot not
typically considered acceptable for baseball games.

“I love that shot,” Fox gushes. “I know I'm not
supposed to, but I just love it.”

Fox is not raving over the pinpoint accuracy of Dodger
pitcher Odalis Perez's fastball. He's talking about the fact that, in
selecting a particular shot of Perez firing the ball, he has decided to
cut Perez's body in half. Normally, for baseball telecasts, most
directors would show the pitcher's entire body as he winds up and hurls
the ball homeward.

HDNet’s production truck with instant replay stations and a wall of HD monitors. Photo: Tony Donaldson.

“You normally want to see his legs and feet moving, to
demonstrate his wind-up, and because baseball has a balk rule,”
says Fox. “You need to see a pitcher's feet to watch for a balk.
In HD, it makes sense to periodically break this rule.” Pointing
to a production monitor, Fox continues, “Here, we get a clear,
wide shot behind the pitcher, also showing the batter, the catcher, and
the umpire — so clear you can even see into the catcher's mask
and see his eyes, as well as the crowd behind home plate. You could
never show that in standard def.”

Fox's “cheating” typifies significant differences in the
creative approach to cutting cameras during HD sports telecasts.

“Normally, in standard def, as the director, I would ask one
camera to go from a wide shot to a tight shot of a player on the field,
and back to a wide shot,” Fox explains, pointing out various
examples on the monitor wall. “Here, we have different
cameras do that. We want to eliminate camera movement whenever
possible. The picture is wider, obviously, and more compelling as a
still image, so you can watch the action happen within the frame.
Rather than have a camera follow the ball continuously, as you would in
standard def, we use more static shots, cutting from camera to camera
more frequently.”

This is the first season that HDNet has broadcast a full slate of
Major League games — an 80-game schedule, produced by the
company's two proprietary HD production trucks as they travel the
country. Fox says his biggest challenge has been getting local camera
crews “thinking for the wide screen, breaking out of traditional
habits.”

“In many cities, these guys have never shot HD before, so we
have to get them up to speed,” says Fox. “I hold a lengthy
camera meeting before every game and we go over the differences. We try
to explain that they can't go as tight on a subject as they normally
might, that we reduce camera movement and cut cameras more often, and
most important, that they have to be extremely careful with focus.
Right now, they are limited to standard-def monitors on their cameras,
so I am constantly reminding them to watch their focus.”

Fox insists his network's approach to baseball coverage is
“pioneering,” not only because it's so rare, but because
HDNet is still forced to work its way around a handful of limitations,
“which keep us on our toes.” Most notable among those
limitations — broadcasts like this Dodger-Blue Jay game are still
“hybrid” in the sense that “we piggyback the [Fox
Sports Network standard-def] broadcast for their graphics and their
announcers.”

“We have to be sharp, always prepared to follow the Fox
announcers as we pick and air our own replays, and we rely on their
stats and other graphics,” he adds. “But we never show a
standard-def element full screen on our air. We fly a box [labeled
̵Standard Definition'] and insert the Fox graphics or announcers
into that box, across a portion of the screen.”

(For a full list of the equipment used in HDNet's production trucks
— HD1 and HD2 — check out the mobile unit page of the
company's website, at www.hd.net/mobileunitspecs.html.)

To comment on this article, email the Video Systems editorial
staff at vsfeedback@primediabusiness.com.