Raising HDTV Consumer Comfort Still Biggest Challenge—ESPN

Burns said he visited the FCC 2 months ago to address Commission concerns that the DTV transition is too slow. He said he went armed with a list of catchphrases he found in DTV set ads in a single Sun. newspaper to press his argument at the Commission that the message to the consumer isn’t simple. Saying his favorite was for a feature called “dynamic quadruple focus,” he said: “What the hell is that? If we're going to ride this thing out, we've got to make it more simple. We've got to make Joe and Martha more comfortable with this.”

The original goal of ESPN-HD was to carry 100 major sports “events” in 720p high definition its first year, but it actually carried 145 and is on pace to exceed 185 in 2004, Burns said. With the Sept. 12 debut of a new NFL studio at its Bristol, Conn., hq, the thinking at ESPN-HD has shifted from total events to total hours of HDTV carriage, he said; the plan soon is have 6,000 hours of HDTV encompassing 2,000 programs, he said. ESPN-HD for the first time will carry this weekend’s Travers Stakes live from Saratoga, N.Y., in addition to the USC-Va. Tech NCAA football game this Sat., he said.

It has been “a wild ride” for ESPN-HD, with over 70 million households contracted to carry the service, Burns said. But cost challenges continue to abound, he said. For example, he said anyone familiar with an ESPN-HD football telecast has noticed that the “super slo-mo” cameras mounted in either end zone, although widescreen, are not HD because those “don’t exist. They're coming out of the box right now and should be available in our format of choice, 720p, before the end of the year. But the costs are going to be astronomical.” Tradeoffs will continue to be made between “business decisions and technical decisions,” he said: “The point is, those of you who are reading that the costs of HDTV production are going down -- at least from our chair, I'm not buying that crap yet. We're still using equipment that has serial numbers ‘00001’ on it.”

If 2004 is “the calm before the storm” when real HDTV acceptance begins to kick in, 2010 will be when “the tsunami hits the beach” and 100 million HDTV sets are installed in U.S. homes, Burns said. However, with them will be perhaps 200 million legacy analog sets, given the 80% of households owning multiple TVs this year, he said. “We'll have some big decisions to make,” such as whether there should be 2 ESPNs or one, and what’s the “tipping point” for making any conclusions, he said. As a result, “we've got one eye focused on what we're doing today, and the other eye focused on what needs to be done tomorrow.”

In a panel after the Burns keynote, Darcy Antonellis, Warner Bros. exec. vp-distribution & technology operations, said her company has “an extremely committed agenda” for HDTV. Some 21 of 25 TV series produced by Warner studios are “originating” in HDTV, she said. But as an example of how far HDTV needs to go to reach common acceptance, Hal Protter, senior vp-technology for the WB TV Network, estimated that although 65% of his company’s programming is in HD, there has been little call from the advertising industry to produce HDTV-quality commercials. However, Karl Meisenbach, HDNet dir. of advertising & sponsorship sales, said the trend might be shifting. He said senior executives of major advertisers will begin putting the onus on their agencies to produce commercials in widescreen HDTV when they see how dull their 4:3 standard-definition spots look surrounded by a 720p football telecast. That will “stir the entire agency world,” Meisenbach said. Just 2 days ago, he said he learned that Target Stores had begun finishing all its new commercials in HDTV. “When I heard that, I nearly fell off my chair,” Meisenbach said.