CBS' Evening News Goes HD, Quietly
Audio glitch takes shine off glossy HD debut for CBS' Evening News with Katie Couric.
By Glen Dickson -- Broadcasting & Cable, 7/29/2008 2:33:00 PM
CBS' Evening News with Katie Couric began broadcasting Monday night in 1080-line interlace HD, supported by a new multimillion-dollar control room that CBS spent the past year-and-a-half building.
Although the HD video looked pristine, the start of the broadcast was plagued by audio problems that forced many affiliates to switch back to the standard-definition broadcast for the first half of the program.
As first reported by TVNewser, viewers in markets such as Washington, D.C., and Chattanooga, Tenn., had no audio at the beginning of the broadcast, while stations in other major markets showed SD video for the first half of the newscast. The audio problem was fixed and the HD feed was fully restored midway through the broadcast.
A CBS spokeswoman confirmed that there was an issue with the Dolby Digital audio during the first 11 minutes of the Evening News broadcast's East Coast feed.
Some major-market affiliates solved the problem by switching to the two-channel stereo audio from the SD feed and upconverting that to Dolby Digital for their HD broadcasts, while others simply switched completely to the SD feed to support their digital-TV channels until the HD feed was fixed. West Coast viewers of the program were unaffected.
CBS said the audio gltch was caused by the failure of a metadata inserter, which had previously passed the network's qualification testing, and the problem has been fixed.
Digital audio has long been cited by network and station engineers as the hardest part of broadcasting in HD, and audio glitches have plagued everything from Super Bowl halftime shows to local stations' HD newscasts.
Reflecting the technological leap that HD represents, Couric closed the Evening News with a segment explaining the move to HD that showed off the new control room, interviewed senior production staff and illustrated the difference in resolution and aspect ratio between SD and HD.
Couric closed her inaugural HD broadcast with this quip about the power of HD resolution: "It's so good you can almost see what I'm thinking -- but not quite."
