ESPN-HD Plans Soon to Use 1080p Cameras
In a potential boon for those who predict a proliferation of 1080p HDTV sets for sale at the high end next year but fear a scarcity of programming to do them justice, a senior ESPN executive told our affiliated Consumer Electronics Daily that ESPN-HD plans to begin using “some” 1080p cameras “in the near future.”
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But Bryan Burns, ESPN vp-strategic planning & business development, offered the significant qualifier that “passing of a 1080p signal to our distributors and on to consumers would be a complex undertaking for all parties involved,” and would raise a host of “difficult bandwidth, legal and other issues.” Nevertheless, Burns said ESPN-HD’s ambitions on 1080p cameras are credible testimony that “we at ESPN are big fans of progressive- scan technology” for HDTV, “whether it be 720p or 1080p.”
His disclosure on ESPN-HD’s possible near-term use of 1080p camera equipment came as he took issue with a report chronicling the many speakers at last week’s HDTV Forum in L.A. who predicted 1080p would become the dominant step-up feature in top-end DTV sets next year. The report said set-makers’ enthusiasm for the emergence of 1080p at retail seemed directed as a backlash against statements earlier in the conference by Burns and an ABC executive in which they passionately defended 720p as the best format for high-definition football telecasts (CD Aug 25 p7). Burns said ESPN’s unabashed support for 720p as stated at the HDTV Forum, and elsewhere, comes at the expense not of 1080p but of interlaced 1080i. The key distinction is “not about the ‘720’ and the ‘1080,'” he emphasized, “it’s about the ‘p’ and the ‘i.'”