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Education
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The move to multicast
‘Education Station’ expands offerings
Aug 31, 2004
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by James Careless
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Beyond its role as a Los Angeles PBS member station, KLCS-58 is the TV outlet for the Los Angeles Unified School District. Since the 1970s, KLCS has been producing and broadcasting educational programs to 1,000 local schools via its tower on Mount Wilson. Now, a recent digital upgrade is allowing the station to provide even more programming and information to its community.
For the past 30 years, KLCS has been airing 24 hours a day of K-12 educational as well as PBS programming from its Los Angeles-based facility. Over the years, it has produced more than 3,000 hours of classroom instructional TV programs, including more than 140 curriculum-matched series and 1,600 individual program titles. KLCS has also produced more than 500 hours of professional development programming for teachers. Currently, its programming is distributed to stations in 15 other states.
Productivity aside, the vintage-1973 operation was getting a bit long in the tooth a few years ago. And with the requirement to offer DTV services, KLCS managers saw an opportunity.
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| KLCS has upgraded from an all-tape facility to a completely digital, tapeless environment. |
“We decided it was time to replace our all-tape analog facilities with a modern digital tapeless environment,” said Alan Popkin, KLCS director of TV engineering and technical operations. “We also realized that moving to DTV, with its multicasting and data carriage capabilities, offered us educational opportunities that were too good to miss.
“Essentially, we could use the same master control staff to manage not one but four or more TV channels, all by changing their jobs from managing and playing tape to supervising and tweaking automated server-based program playout. We could also move from being a single channel TV station to a mutli-channel, multimedia content provider.”
Infrastructure Investment
Upgrading to DTV standards wasn’t an easy task for KLCS, but the tower wasn’t a challenge—located 5,600 feet up on Mount Wilson, Popkin was able to combine its DTV channel 41 transmissions with its existing NTSC channel 58 feed. “We are using a wideband Dielectric antenna mounted on a 150-foot tower, powered by an Axcera DTV transmitter,” said Popkin. “It provides excellent coverage to the school district, although there are a few schools that are ‘shaded’ by mountains.”
Similarly, equipping the LAUSD’s schools to receive the KLCS digital feeds was also relatively simple. “Each of the schools already has some kind of TV tower,” said Popkin. “We just attached a low-cost UHF antenna cut for channel 41 to each one, and wired it down to a PC server equipped with a DTV receiver card inside the school. In turn, this PC uses the school’s LAN to deliver programming and data to computers throughout the building.”
Where the big technical challenges occurred was at the station’s studio facilities. “Our building was built in the 1950s, and the latest TV production center in the early 1970s,” he explained. “In order to renovate our plant, we had to tear out the entire technical core and start from scratch.”
Besides installing a 28-channel Omneon Spectrum video server farm and high-bandwidth networking to store and transport its all-digital output, KLCS needed a new production switcher. Popkin selected a FOR-A Hanabi HVS-3000S SDTV console, which replaced the station’s old analog switcher and external DVE. Four Hitachi Z-3000W digital 4:3/16:9 switchable cameras live in KLCS’s 3,000-square-foot studio. Leitch Technology has provided the lion’s share of KLCS’ DTV infrastructure.
Creative Scheduling
A Sundance Digital Titan automation system manages the station’s 24 hour scheduling demands, which are considerable. Sundance has also provided KLCS with its Seeker digital asset management software and Intelli-Sat incoming satellite feed manager.
From 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., the Education Station—as KLCS brands itself—simulcasts its analog feed in digital, plus multicasts three SDTV channels. “We run a digital elementary school channel, secondary school channel, and professional development channel,” said Popkin. “We also offer streamed video broadcasts to schools during this time period, because our DTV multiplex can be configured to transmit up to 10 channels at a time.”
From 4 to 8 p.m., KLCS drops any additional broadcasts and sticks to its four SDTV channel configuration. This month, they are expected to implement HD carriage. From 8 to 11 p.m., in line with its PBS duties, KLCS will broadcast one HD channel of PBS material and one DTV simulcast of KLCS-58.
After 11 p.m. and up to 8 a.m., the programming offered on KLCS changes once again. Besides offering PBS in SD, the station takes advantage of its available DTV bandwidth to do some major file sharing.
“We send out all kinds of multimedia content to our schools overnight, such as video, PowerPoint presentations, and lesson plans,” said Popkin. “Some are meant for the entire district, others are addressed to specific courses, schools, or teachers.”
KLCS also provides near video on demand [NVOD] services for teachers, who can browse the KLCS Web site for content, sort it by grade level, subject matter, or a number of other factors, view low-res proxies, and then order materials. Using a Skyscraper system from Triveni Digital, KLCS transmits a high-resolution copy to the school’s receiver overnight, which caches it. “We then send an e-mail with a hotlink to the content at their site,” Popkin explained. “The teacher can call up the video on their classroom’s computers using Windows Media Player 9.”
The new digital plant went on the air in April 2003, but KLCS is, “already looking at version 2.0,” Popkin said. “We want to use push technology to provide teachers with a full suite of programs related to their courses, updated on a monthly basis. In this way, our services will be in lockstep with our teachers’ needs.”
One thing is certain: Popkin is very pleased with what DTV has to offer to Los Angeles schools. “We are able to do much more with our facilities, and do much more for our teachers, using DTV technology,” he said. “For us, it represents a quantum leap in service improvement.”
MORE INFO
Axcera (800) 215-2614 www.axcera.com
Dielectric (800) 341-9678 www.dielectric.com
FOR-A (714) 894-3311 www.for-a.com
Hitachi (516) 921-7200 www.hdal.com
KLCS (213) 241-4029 www.leitch.com
Omneon (408) 585-5000www.omneon.com
Triveni Digital (609) 716-3500 www.trivenidigital.com
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