As part of an agreement between Goodyear and JVC Professional Products, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company will be providing ABC’s Monday Night Football with HD footage from one of its fleet of blimps.
The HD system incorporates JVC’s DM-JV600U high definition MPEG-2 encoder and DM-D4600UC MPEG-2 decoder. The first-ever high definition telecast of a sporting event from a blimp was successfully transmitted during the August 9, 2004 telecast of ABC’s pre-season Monday Night Football Hall of Fame game.
The “Spirit of Goodyear” blimp, based in Akron, OH, broadcast the HD images of the game nationwide, a technological feat made possible by the JVC DM-JV600U encoder and DM-D4600UC decoder working together with a NuComm microwave system and Ikegami HDK-79NA-H all-digital HD camera.
The DM-JV600U is an advanced MPEG-2 encoder that takes the uncompressed HD signals from the Ikegami HDK-79NA-H 1080i camera and compresses them into a 25Mbps transport stream. The transport stream is then fed to the NuComm Analog-Coder, where it is converted and transmitted to a receiving station on the ground. The microwave signal is then demodulated back to the 25Mbps transport stream and fed to a production trailer on the ground. All of this is accomplished with the Spirit of Goodyear’s existing analog microwave system. In the trailer, JVC’s decoder converts the MPEG-2 data into a 720p feed for ABC’s HD telecast. The signal is also converted to standard definition for transmission to ABC’s regular feed, enabling non-HD viewers to still see crisp, clear shots from the blimp.
