Ethnic-American Broadcasting Company, the country's largest distributor of foreign-language programming, has selected JVC's Digital-S videotape format as the company's house format for its 24-hour Russian-language broadcast service. The company's initial purchase included four BR-D85 editing recorders with pre-read and five BR-D85 editing recorders with pre-read and five BR-D80 editing recorders.
Ethnic-American Broadcasting Company (EABC) was founded nine years ago as a local all-Russian language radio station. The company quickly expanded its product offerings to meet market demands and is now a full-production facility that downlinks television signals in five foreign languages (Arabic, Italian, Filipino, Chinese and Russian) and distributes them across North America, EABC also offers local television and radio programming in Russian. EABC has nine radio studios located in Fort LEE, NJ, Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, Portland , Seattle, Sacrament, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Director of Engineering and Broadcast Support, Denis J. Roche, called the move to Digital-S an obvious choice, and expressed pleasure with the format's competitive performance and price. "After a rigorous technical evaluation of all the major digital formats, we selected Digital-S as our house format, " said Roche. "Digital-S offers outstanding picture quality that rivals the most expensive digital systems, but its price is literally half. There is no question that JVC's Digital-S product is the best choice for our broadcast.
"Point of fact, an engineer like myself is always concerned about picture quality," continued Roche. "However, another major factor we considered when we chose Digital-S was its low tape cost. If Digital-S was priced like some its competitors, we wouldn't have made the deal. It would have cost too much to feed the machine."
Mild 3.3:1 compression was another significant reason EABC chose Digital-S. "The ability to get back in several times to edit a piece without loss of chroma resolution is a big factor. It's a great tape design," commented Roche.
Roche also noted that Digital-S has the ability to grow with the needs to the station."One of the primary reasons we selected Digital-S above DV, which is also a low-cost digital alternative, is that while we currently uplink a single analog signal, eventually we will be uplinking in the MCPC mode. And when we do, we will be glad to have 4:2:2 component digital, SMPTE 259 format output with 3.3:1 compression. A format with higher compression ratios could begin to show artifacts with further MPEG compression and decompression," Roche concluded.