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MillimeterThe Maverick Network
Aug 1, 2002 12:00 PM, By Cody Holt
Web Expanded
"HDNet
Photo Gallery"
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"An HD Ballgame"
Making up the rules as they go, Mark Cuban andPhil Garvin are pioneering new high-def territory with HDNet.
 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.”
Sidebar
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.)
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