ASTRAL TELEVISION’S THE MOVIE NETWORK was one of the first, if not the first Canadian TV channel to show a regular diet of high definition content, dating back to about 2000, says the company’s vice-president, technology, Chris Bell.
With TMN HD and the recent launch of MHD (basically an HD version of classic film channel Moviepix, or Mpix) Astral now has a pair of 24/7 HD channels to go along with its HD Viewers Choice Pay Per View movie offerings.
Studios these days are trying to keep up with the growing and voracious demand for high def content and are busily digitizing as much of their library content as possible (but for more than just HD – maybe your ring tone will be "Follow the Yellow Brick Road" someday), so getting movies in HD is pretty easy now. 
But, there remain HD issues on the front and back burners.
What follows is an edited transcript of a recent chat between Bell (left) www.cartt.ca editor and publisher Greg O’Brien.
Greg O’Brien: Are you able to get the much-older movies in high definition?
Chris Bell: I’m not the best person to ask what’s available right now… What we’ve really focused on is, as we’ve been renewing studio deals, to get HD built into those deals for the library titles. And the reality of it is that they have quite a bit of stuff – and that’s only going to increase… Movies are an important part of every broadcaster’s schedule and the critical part of what we do, obviously, and there is just increasing pressure on the studios.
So, they’ll be going back… the film libraries are quite large but I imagine that over some period of time virtually everything will be available in HD.
GOB: How ready is Astral for a full HD conversion?
CB: Very ready. We started dabbling in this six years ago. If you go back to the ’90s, before the DVD was really out in the marketplace, broadcast television was the highest quality signal that you could get – much better than VHS tape.
Then DVD came along and now all of a sudden you have a signal that’s as good as or in a lot of cases better than anything available on broadcast television. And, one of the big things was 5.1 audio, as well. So, in the late 90s, we were paying a lot of attention to this… particularly for our standard def service because we needed to be competitive with the DVD marketplace. We’re a premium movie service and all about the immersive experience, so we had to continue to be as good or better than anything else that a consumer could get in their homes.
We were motivated very early to get into this and even today, we’re one of the very few broadcasters who do 5.1 audio quite consistently.
We also have been a multiplex broadcaster for pay TV and in terms of pay per view, we deliver 45 to 48 channels with barker channels so we’ve been in this largely massive channel origination mode for many many years.
GOB: You’re completely server based now, right?
CB: We have been since the late ’90s. We got into this long before most broadcasters were using servers for long-form content. So, as a result, our whole infrastructure is based around servers and automation.
GOB: You still get tape from studios, though.
CB: We get tape from the studios but at some point in time that will change as well. We’ll see electronic delivery but I don’t think we have a common currency for that. We have digital Betacam tape and Panasonic D5 and now we’re seeing HD Cam as delivery but from a movie perspective, it’s Panasonic D5 these days.
We take the tape from the studios and digitize it because we’re doing a number of forms of digital delivery. We’re doing subscription video on demand, we’re doing high-def, we’re doing pay per view – so our whole workflow and process is based around bringing in content, adjusting it, doing a digital encode into servers and then providing it to those various service platforms.
GOB: How far away are we from high definition on demand?
CB: I think some is going on in the States today. I’ve talked to our cable affiliates about it and I think they are keen to do it. I would hope that it’s less than a year. I can’t say that definitively, though. The big issue for them is that bandwidth is four to five times (what is needed to deliver SD on demand), so as you’re architecting your VOD plant, you’ve got to allocate that much more channel bandwidth to the system.
Personally, based on the success we’ve had with our SVOD, we can’t wait to do HD SVOD because it’s what the consumers want. I hear anecdotally from subscribers how important their PVR is to them and for movies, they just naturally lend themselves to what consumers want to do – which is to have that control. The kind of usage we’ve seen on our SVOD is phenomenal… we have close to 70% of our subscribers using it on a regular basis.
So, HD is just the perfect platform to provide it to, particularly now in an environment there isn’t a lot of HD at all hours of the day. Prime time broadcast TV is getting quite good from a commercial television perspective but for pay and specialty, it’s pretty thin in terms of the content offering. So, people who have HD are looking for HD content whenever they’re ready to watch it.
GOB: Other than sports and movies, there’s not much else from pay and specialty in HD.
CB: Not a tremendous amount. Discovery has just rolled out their 24 hour HD channel. But you’re right, there isn’t a lot (of HD) – certainly during the daytime hours. It really is concentrated in prime time and from our perspective, looking to provide our premium subscribers with content – we need to get to 24/7, like we did for TMN some time back now, all the time.
GOB: Is this a high stress time, given the number of technical changes that have taken place and are taking place in the TV industry?
CB: it is clearly a very different environment than 10 or so years ago. We have tended to push – because we’re a premium service – right at the very edges of the envelope. We were the first to do 5.1. The first to regularly schedule HD – and the first to do long form content. Forty-eight channels of pay per view from video servers – we were doing that in the late 1990s.
Yes, it is stressful. As you implement these plans, you go through a lot of stuff for the first time but today, those things that were very challenging in the late ’90s are fairly commonplace. We see archive management solutions, robotic tape and digital archives and servers are becoming the common building blocks for a broadcast facility to have.
But, when we tried to do this several years ago, those building blocks were in their infancy and trying to actually put them together in a system was quite challenging. We’re actually into our fourth generation of servers and in HD, into our second generation.
GOB: Where do you get those from?
CB: The current stuff we’re about to implement is Grass Valley’s K2, which relies heavily on IT technology. It’s moved away from the strictly broadcast server and tends to use more IT building blocks – and a number of server manufacturers are doing this now.
GOB: What does that allow you to do that you couldn’t before?
CB: It gives (the manufacturers) the ability to provide systems far more cost-effectively. They tend to be modular so you buy chassis’ of disk drives rather than systems that are custom-built into a server as they might have been several years ago.
We have another system that we’re building right now – a second generation of our standard-def service – which uses a PC with software decoders in it to provide the outputs. In the past, we would have had hardware decoder cards physically built into a custom chassis for the server that would provide these outputs. Now we have a massive storage array with gigabit Ethernet links into PCs which have software decoder outputs in them.
It gives us the ability to really leverage the IT technology – which is inexpensive and built at the edges.
GOB: More flexibility and lower costs.
CB: Absolutely, We implemented about a year ago a very large storage array system that stores our entire library on spinning disk. Up to a few years ago, that would have been cost-prohibitive. Now it’s actually feasible to do this.
So, when we talk about HD, for us it just means bigger files. It takes more disk space in the server or if we’re storing it on a digital tape in an archive, it takes up more tape space. As time goes on, as you’re aware, disk drives and tape storage systems, the capacity is going up, year after year.
GOB: What about getting high definition Canadian content?
CB: I’m really glad you asked that question because that’s an area where we’re pushing really hard and have had great success of late. In terms of Canadian movies, going back more than a year, we started to write into all of the contracts that HD and 5.1 delivery is a necessary condition. It isn’t a "we’d like to have it," it’s a "you must do this."
It’s at the point now that unless it’s extreme hardship, we won’t accept it unless it’s delivered in HD. We started this 18 months ago so we’re starting to see the fruits of that change (since from licensing a film to completion it can take up to 24 months) and that will increase over time.
The other important thing is Canadian series drama, and we have a number of significant ones, Terminal City, Stunt Dogs and ReGenesis season two are actually being shot and delivered in HD. We also have Slings and Arrows and G-Spot which was shot on film and delivered to us in HD. As far as Canadian film and series go, we’re actually doing very well in getting it delivered in HD.
GOB: What about the French-language Canadian HD – to splice it down even further?
CB: It’s a lot tougher in that marketplace. It’s hard for anybody because HD tends to be more cost and no new revenue opportunities and the French language market, it’s even more difficult. I’ve been asked when we’re going to roll out HD for Astral Television’s French-language services and the best I can say is my expectation is within 12 months but none of this is cast in stone.
We want urgently to be in the French market in HD but getting the product (original, dubbed or subtitled) is substantially more difficult. Even getting 5.1 audio in standard definition for the French language market is tough to do.
GOB: Given the history of Astral, do you have Porky’s in high definition yet?
CB: (laughter) That’s a good question and I don’t know the answer to that, sorry.
GOB: That’s back in the history of the company (the late Harold Greenberg, brother of Astral CEO Ian Greenberg, produced a number of movies, including the Canadian cult classic Porky’s (1982) – as well as Porky’s II and Porky’s Revenge, well before the company was a pay TV broadcaster).
CB: Somewhere we have to get somebody to pay for the transfer of that. It’s interesting, I look across all of the services that Astral has been involved in and in every case, as we’re renegotiating rights, we’re looking at HD and SVOD. Whether it’s Family or Teletoon or whatever service we’re involved in, this is what we need to do to meet customer expectations.
