WUFT-TV beats digital deadline

Deadlines often put the fear of God in journalists, but the College’s PBS station is having no problem meeting the Federal Communications Commission’s looming digital deadline.

The FCC mandates that all broadcasters switch to a digital signal by February.

“We knew it was coming,” said Rob Carr, the College’s director of engineering for broadcasting. “So we got a new transmitter and started our digital transmissions.”

The transmitter takes in standard-definition (SD) feeds and transmits them to viewers in a digital signal. HD, or high definition, is an enhanced format of video, giving the content a crisp look.

“We can only broadcast what the distributors produce,” said Titus Rush, WUFT-TV’s station manager. “So, as a broadcaster, we’re ready to do HD, but … there isn’t a lot of HD product out there.”

PBS is UF’s program distributor and is in the process of building up its HD material.

WUFT-TV is already broadcasting from its Weimer Hall studio in HD. It’s broadcasting one HD signal, two digital signals, and one in SD analogue, which will no longer exist after the February digital deadline.

WUFT produces “WUFT News,” “Gallery,” “Law Matters,” “Gator Beat” and “North Florida Journal” in HD.

This gives the dozens of students who work at WUFT an edge, said Neal Bennett, TEL 1993, news director for WVIR TV in Charlottesville, Va.

“When I worked for News 5 in 1992,” he said, “we were shooting on three-fourth inch tape, lugging around huge decks. There aren’t many universities that have an all-digital newsroom. They’re going to have a new piece of knowledge that gives them a leg up.”

This motivated WUFT to get ahead of the curve, Rush said.

“We have a teaching mission,” he noted.

With the new HD technology, students will learn to capture content in HD, and to maintain their content in HD format all the way through the production process to end up with a final “native” HD product.

“Last year, we got the production switcher. This year we’re doing cameras,” Carr said. “Next year, we hope to have a video server to store content, in conjunction with the College’s new Center for Media Innovation and Research.”

Funding for the HD studio transformation has come from grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Department of Commerce and Florida’s Department of Education.

So far, WUFT has spent about $3 million. It will take about another $2.5 million to finish the project, Rush said.

To keep up with the competitiveness of satellite radio and to have the ability to do multiple programming, the College’s radio station went HD in 2006. Since then, WUFT-FM has been broadcasting three different HD channels.

Going HD allows the station to broadcast a digital signal with multiple channels with a cleaner sound.

“The stations’ digitial conversion,” Dean John Wright said, “enhances our efforts to become a world leader in the education of digital communication.”

–Heather Strange

This article was originally published in the Fall 2008 issue of communigator.