Europe Closing the Gap on HD Production

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By Juan Pablo Conti

Juan Pablo Conti, the former editor of UK magazines The IET Communications Engineer and Cable & Satellite Communications International (CSCI), is an independent technology journalist based in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Somewhat ironically given Europe's rich history of broadcast innovation, when it comes to high-definition television (HDTV) the Old Continent has so far been more of a follower than a leader.

The first regular transmissions of HDTV didn't start in Europe until January 2004, when Belgian broadcaster Euro1080 launched a channel offering a modest four to five hours of daily programming. By then, Japanese audiences had already been receiving dozens of commercial HD services for over nine years, with North American viewers not far behind.

Up until that point in the mid-2000s, the only consolation for an otherwise nonexistent European HDTV industry was that—at least in the crucial department of content production - many companies had been able to stay state-of-the-art. Despite the lack of agreed standards and networks capable of delivering HD content in their domestic markets, European content producers had good reasons to experiment with HD shooting from an early stage.

This has been especially true for those large-scale productions that have been made with the more developed Japanese and American program buying market in mind. TV series the caliber of Rome (filmed in Italy in a co-production between RAI, HBO and the BBC), owe a large part of their global success to the fact that they were entirely shot in HD.

Over the past four years, cable, satellite, IPTV and digital terrestrial operators across Europe have been stepping up their deployments of high-definition services. In the British, French and German markets, hardly a week passes without an announcement about the addition of a new channel to one of the sprouting pay-TV and even free-to air digital HD bouquets.

While the vast majority of what is broadcast in the region is still in standard definition (SD), content acquisition is nonetheless increasingly performed in HD. "Most of the producers are shooting a high proportion of their content in HD," says Ian Trow, director of broadcast solutions at digital compression equipment vendor Harmonic.

According to Trow, there are both commercial and technical motivations behind this trend. Commercially, "to only shoot in SD nowadays is a very limiting option because, if you want to attract the attention of most premium channels and premium services, they're assuming that the content is going to be made available in HD".

From a technical perspective, shooting in HD is the best way to preserve signal quality upfront; in other words, to get the master in the highest possible acquisition quality. "There is a lot of evidence that, even if you're only distributing material as SD, there are significant benefits for still shooting in HD because you get a higher quality SD picture distributed to the home," says Trow.

Newsgathering: Last and Least

While documentaries, original studio-based productions of any genre from drama to live entertainment and coverage of some sports and music events all fall within this category of high-end video acquisition, there is one major area of European TV production where SD acquisition continues to be the norm: news.

Understandably, the everyday running of newsgathering crews who are chasing breaking stories is a process where the emphasis is on how fast - and not how high quality - your video acquisition technology is.

Some organizations such as Sky News in the UK have developed the necessary studio infrastructure to produce HD news programs. But, in general, broadcasters have had to combine this HD signal from the studio environment with up-converted versions of SD material generated and transmitted by their outside broadcast (OB) vans.

The narrow nature and high cost of the bandwidth that OB units need to link up with their headquarters have been the two biggest limiting factors. "There are a few broadcasters now that are building HD mobile capabilities for dealing with news gathering and event coverage," says Trow. "But that is just starting."

London-based BBC Studios and Post Production (until recently known as BBC Resources) runs one of the largest production operations in Europe. Over the past couple of years, the company has been busy helping a host of programs to either upgrade to HD format for the first time or increase their existing HD output.

In November 2009, the legendary Elstree Studio D (the same where The Muppet Show was recorded between 1976 and 1980) was officially added to the growing list of the company's studios that are now equipped to support HD production. The facility was chosen to provide the studio scenes for - fittingly - yet a new children TV series called Relic, Guardians of the Museum.

In just two weeks, 13 half-hour episodes were recorded using four Sony HDC-1500 cameras and the Japanese manufacturer's HD XDCam tapeless professional video system.

The incorporation of HD cameras is obviously an important, but by no means the only key modification that old studios such as Elstree D need to undertake in order to become "HD-ready".

Georgie Hollett, the BBC Studios and Post Production's head of communications, says HD cameras will typically need new lenses, viewfinders and camera control units. Other pieces of infrastructure that need to be upgraded include new routers and cabling; up- and down-converters; glue; stills stores; caption generators; record and replay devices; monitors; vision mixers; and engineering test equipment.

The modifications required aren't always necessarily technical: "Aesthetically, HD will expose some flaws that were previously unnoticeable in the SD studio look," Hollett notes. "This may include both scenery and the floor; most studio floors are marked, and HD image quality brings those marks out well."

It's Good to be Late

HDTV might have taken longer than anticipated to hit European distribution video networks. However, from that lone Belgian signal that broke the deadlock in 2004, the region will see the number of HD channels explode to over 600 by 2013, according to data from market research firm EuroConsult.

"Europe was slow catching on the HD bandwagon," says Trow. "But this has meant that, whereas a lot of the infrastructure in the US was launched early and is therefore based around the HD MPEG-2 compression standard, Europe could reap the benefits of going straight to HD AVC."

The video compression expert says this has allowed European operators to largely avoid awkward transition issues between MPEG-2 and AVC (also known as H.264/MPEG-4). "There were some operators who launched early services that were based on MPEG-2 but, by and large, most HD services are AVC."

A number of cable operators have been unfortunate in that they are still restricted to MPEG-2, which effectively means they need to use higher bit rates per channel than operators encoding their signals in MPEG-4.

In the UK, for example, the BBC HD channel is separately encoded in MPEG-4 (for its distribution over satellite and digital terrestrial platforms) and MPEG-2 for its transmission over the Virgin Media cable network.

Regardless of the platform via which they distribute HD content to their viewers, broadcasters are under constant pressure to drive down bit rates. "They work in a commercial world where bit rate is extremely scarce, particularly delivered to the home," says Trow.

The consequence of this commercial reality has been a sustained push on the development of better encoding technology. In August 2009, the BBC drastically reduced the bit rate of its BBC HD signal from between 14/19 Mbps down to 9.7 Mbps. The move caused outrage among many of the viewers. They felt betrayed after having decided to invest in HDTV receiving equipment largely based on a series of demos where the public channel initially looked stunning - only for them to find out a few months later that the service had lost much of its wow factor overnight.

Danielle Nagler, the head of the BBC HD, insists that the new, more efficient coding technology deployed in August shouldn't translate into a degraded picture quality. "The old hardware was reaching the end of its life and was no longer supported effectively," she explained in a recent blog post. "We therefore put new encoders into service, supported by new software. These encoders handle pictures differently from the old, and are therefore able to work with a lower bit rate."

But Harmonic's Ian Trow doesn't buy the argument: "Undoubtedly, when you pull back something from the consumer, people start noticing artifacts." Still, he acknowledges that there are good reasons why broadcasters strive to attain lower HD bit rates. PVR usage is just one of them: "When you're recording anything on HD Freesat [the free-to-air satellite platform jointly run by the BBC and ITV in the UK], it'll chew up your hard disk space pretty quickly."

Even after the practically halving of the original bit rate, Trow says that 9.7 Mbit/s is still the sort of data throughput that several US broadcasters would regard as very high for the distribution of an HD channel.

Fiber to the Stadium

Coverage of the past two major sporting events (the 2006 World Cup in Germany and the Beijing Olympics) saw an unprecedented proportion of live action captured in high-definition video. Driving this generous HD output was the growing trend of "fibered stadiums" and other large venues.

"The moment that you start talking about dedicated OC-3 lines (which offer transmission speeds of up to 155 Mbps), it radically changes the approach of broadcasters towards events coverage," says Trow. Most of the Premiership football stadiums in the UK are now fibered. In those cases, there isn't the need to compress to quite the level that there previously was for satellite-linked venues.

The narrow satellite bandwidth would typically limit the capacity of contribution links between venue and broadcaster to around 15 Mbps. The introduction of OC-3 fiber connections has vastly broadened each contribution link up to 45 Mbps.

Such powerful connections are bringing about significant changes to the production work flows associated with live events coverage. Instead of having to transcode from HD production formats such as AVC-Intra to MPEG-4, broadcasters can now take advantage of the fiber infrastructure to push mildly compressed, acquisition-quality video further down the contribution chain.

There's no denying that Japan and North America got there first. But Europe is busy making amends for lost time. Come 2013, 56 million households in Europe will be receiving some form of HD service according to Pacome Revillon, managing director of Euroconsult. Five years later, that figure will swell to over 175 million households.

"It will turn HD into the standard TV experience for most Western and Central European markets," Revillon predicts. And yes—before you ask—his forecast does take into account the current economic climate.

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