WiMAX: The Future of ENG?
TV
reporters and producers may soon have a new, low-cost option for sending
live video of the raging fire or the 10-car pile-up back to the station.
Pioneering
work on adapting WiMAX for ENG is now underway at KIFI, News-Press
& Gazette's ABC affiliate in Idaho Falls, Idaho.
And
so far the fourth-generation wireless broadband access service is
showing a lot of promise. "This opens up a whole new world," says
Mark Danielson, general manager of the KIFI News Group, who has dubbed
its system Wireless Internet News Gathering or, simply, WING.
Unlike
so-called third-generation, high-speed mobile technologies like EVDO,
WiMAX can provide enough upstream bandwidth for live video.
It's
not the best, but it is "definitely acceptable," says Danielson. "Most
viewers probably couldn't tell you we're doing anything different."
Danielson
can tell you about the difference in cost. Satellite is out of the
question for the nation's 163rd largest market. Outfitting a microwave
truck costs about $200,000.
But
KIFI spent just $12,000 to equip a Toyota Highlander SUV with the
necessary hardware and software to send video via WiMAX. "Plus, I
don't have to have any receive sites," Danielson says. "I just have
to be in a place where WiMAX exists with Digital Bridge."
Digital
Bridge Communications is the local WiMAX service provider, with which
KIFI has been closely working. Its BridgeMaxx service covers much
of the same ground as KIFI: Idaho Falls, Pocatello, Twin Falls, Rexburg
and a number of towns in Sun Valley.
"This
is a unique product that was developed for them," says Doug Smith,
Digital Bridge's CIO. "This was a first for both of us and one of
the first, if not the first, instances of doing broadcast over WiMAX
in the U.S. that I'm aware of."
Broadcasters
elsewhere may soon be able to experiment with live video via WiMax.
Using spectrum mostly in the 2.5 GHz band, WiMAX is just getting started
in the United States, and it is expected to pop up in markets across
the country over the next few years.
The
big player is (or will be) Clearwire
Corp., a planned joint venture that will include some of the biggest
names in telecom and high tech: Sprint Nextel, Comcast, Time Warner
Cable, Bright House, Google and Intel. Sprint Nextel, which will own
51 percent of the venture, is folding in its Xohm WiMax unit, which
launched a commercial service in Baltimore just last month.
If
it all comes together, Clearwire expects to roll out WiMAX service
in markets covering about 140 million people by 2010. But what works
in one place may not work in another.
In
Idaho, KIFI and Digital Bridge worked out a "special priority service"
that guarantees KIFI 2 Mbps upstream throughput when needed for a
live shot. A guaranteed upload speed of 2 Mbps is unusual for broadband
wireless service providers.
Typically,
they offer such speeds only for downloads and much slower upstream
bit rates for keystrokes, e-mail and occasional peer-to-peer traffic.
A
news operation, of course, works the other way. It needs only small
swaths of downstream bandwidth and huge chunks for sending video back
to the studio.
Cutting
a deal for the fat upstream pipe may not be possible everywhere. As
the service becomes popular, it will be more difficult for a station
to set up the sort of sweetheart deal that KIFI has with Digital Bridge.
Even
in Idaho Falls, the priority service is only available for regularly
scheduled newscasts. "My verbal agreement with them is around news
time," said Danielson. "We're learning that their peak time also happens
to be around 4 in the afternoon. It's become complicated for them,
but they've been able to deliver."
A
wireless service provider could be forced to choose between the larger
group of customers — some of whom are corporate and paying huge fees
— and a steady paycheck from a news operation.
Raycom
Media, the station group based in Montgomery, Ala., is intrigued by
the KIFI experiment. David Folsom, vice president-CTO at Raycom Media,
says he will probably give it a try in Lubbock, Texas, the only Raycom
market where WiMAX is going to be available.
A
company called Xanadoo is building a system there using licensed 2.5
GHz spectrum. "The biggest hang-up at the moment is that nobody has
created the glue yet for it," says Folsom. "You have a modem and a
laptop and a camera but that doesn't necessarily make a remote facility.
You need all the parts and pieces."
Nobody
knows that better than KIFI, which had to assemble its system form
parts and pieces. Key pieces come from Streambox,
a Seattle-based company that specializes to pushing video over IP
networks.
It's
supplying the software that runs on a laptop and encodes and compresses
the video for WiMAX transmission as well as the decoder that receives
and processes the signal for broadcast back at the station.
"It
really became a three-way partnership between us, Digital Bridge and
Streambox constantly modifying and make this technology work," says
Danielson. "There really are no blueprints for doing what we're doing
yet."
"We'll
see long term whether the QoS [quality of service] holds up," says
Folsom. "The people in the field are not IT people; they're reporters.
The issue is the human interface part and we're working on that right
now."
Danielson
maintains that using WiMAX is not that tough, even for the non-technical
types. "They have a camera, a BridgeMAXX modem, a converter box ...
and a laptop computer with the Streambox encoder software. You look
at the truck and go, ‘That's it?' There's nothing to it. It's simple.
There's no 40-foot mast to worry about."
Aside
from the quality of the signal, Danielson's biggest worry is latency
of about three interminable seconds in the talk-back between the studio
and the remote site.
"We
compensate by cueing the reporter about a second-and-a-half before
the anchor is done talking," Danielson says. "As far as having audio
and video in sync, we have not had any of those issues."
In
any event, Danielson and Folsom agree that WiMAX is a step up from
EVDO, a widely available wireless access service that has been adopted
by many broadcasters for sending video, but only when satellite and
microwave isn't possible.
Folsom
says he doesn't depend on EVDO for live shots. "We use it for those
circumstances in which there's no other way we can do it because we're
out of our normal microwave footprint or there's some other overriding
reason like the weather.
"I
don't suggest for a minute that EVDO is competing with WiMAX at all,
but since WiMAX's footprint is so tiny right now and EVDO is everywhere,
we're using Verizon EVDO+ and it's been fairly decent for us," says
Folsom. "I don't have a lot of complaints."
While
EVDO is improving, Danielson won't go that way again. EVDO can't promise
bandwidth, he says, noting that an upstream throughput of 1 Mbps is
considered a stretch.
At
least for the present, KIFI sees WiMAX as a complement to microwave,
not as a substitute. "We still rely heavily on microwave for our primary
system.
The
only downside with microwave is it's line-of-sight to your receive
towers," he says. Eastern Idaho is mountainous so there are many spots
that are out of microwave range of the station. That's where WiMAX
can help.
"BridgeMAXX
is more like cellular technology where any place you're within a radius
of a WiMAX tower you have the ability to send," says Tory Willmer,
KIFI's IT manager.That
Eastern Idaho is also sparsely populated helps, Danielson adds.
Even
though its spectrum is licensed, WiMAX, like any radio service, is
susceptible to interference, he says. So the more remote the place,
the less the chance of interference.
WiMAX
is one of two fourth-generation mobile wireless technologies. LTE,
or Long Term Evolution, is coming on the heels of EVDO and other third
generation services and, while still several years away, promises
a more ubiquitous coverage and faster upstream service.
But
WiMAX is here now.
"It's
a great application for broadcast," says Danielseon.
"I
predict this is going to be the way things are done in the future.
You could have a fleet of WING vehicles with WiMAX at a fraction of
the cost of a couple satellite trucks or live trucks."
By
Jim Barthold@tvnewsday.com
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