Armstrong Cable relies on Keywest Technology BVTBC10 for superior TBC-frame sync solution

The cable provider in western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio purchased 80 BVTBC10s to expand school channel service for school districts in its coverage area.

While digital video production, DTV distribution and HD get most of the attention in the press these days, good-old NTSC analog video still dominates terrestrial broadcast and cable TV.

Out of the 108 million TV households in the country, about 6 million are expected to buy an HD set this year. Those 6 million plus the 8 million sold to households since the fourth quarter of 1998 mean about 87 percent of all TV households will still be watching regular NTSC TV sets when the New Year rolls around. Add to that the fact that few if any broadcasters have surrendered their analog spectrum assignment, and it’s clear that road to DTV nirvana is a long one –despite the Congressional Dec. 31, 2006, deadline for the analog-to-digital transition.

While the television and cable industries wrestle with this transition, how do they keep their NTSC plants in sync and their video jitter free? If they want to do it affordably with the highest performance possible as Armstrong Cable recently chose to do, they’ll turn to the Keywest Technology BVTBC10 10-bit time base corrector/frame synchronizer.

When Armstrong Cable, which serves communities in western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, began rebuilding its system to upgrade to 750MHz and 862MHz, the company rethought how it was serving the needs of school districts and local communities. “Prior to the rebuild,” explained Armstrong Cable vice president of engineering Ed Hassler, Jr., “we had one school channel in a service area and several school districts in that area that shared the channel.”

As part of the rebuild, the cable company offered each school district in its various service areas the opportunity to distribute their programming to students who attended district schools. “Where there might have been one school channel in the past,” said Hassler, “there are now several, each serving the population that attends that school.”

Typically, school programming is played back from individual schools. Content may be as complex as coverage of sporting events and school activities like graduations or as simple as character generator pages with menus and schedules.

To assure jitter-free playback and rock-solid sync for the school channels, Armstrong Cable purchased 80 Keywest Technology BVTBC10s 10-bit digital time base corrector/frame synchronizers from cable TV equipment distributor Mega Hertz. Since October 2003, the cable provider has been installing the units at various head end and hub locations, depending upon where the school channels are inserted into a particular community’s system.

The BVTBC10
According to Hassler, choosing a TBC “wasn’t rocket science.” Hassler was familiar with the Keywest Technology BVTBC10 because Armstrong Cable had previously purchased a couple of units. Impressed with the BVTBC10’s performance, selecting a vendor for the large installation became a matter of price. Mega Hertz quoted an “aggressive” price, according to Hassler, and Armstrong Cable issued the purchase order for the BVTBC10s.

Affordability is a hallmark of the Keywest Technology BVTBC10. Priced like an 8-bit time base corrector/frame synchronizer, the BVTBC10 delivers 10-bit digital performance. Internally, the BVTBC10 processes CCIR 656 4:2:2 component digital video with 10-bit accuracy to produce the superior results cable head end operators, broadcasters and post-production professionals demand from a time base corrector/frame synchronizer.

The BVTBC10 comes with composite and S-Video inputs and outputs and offers user-selectable support for NTSC and PAL-B. Serial digital video inputs and outputs are available optionally. Housed in a conveniently small one-quarter-rack-unit-sized chassis, the BVTBC10 has full proc-amp control, freeze-frame/field functions, an auto-save function, adjustable pedestal, vertical interval that’s passed from line 10, and analog color bar output. The BVTBC10 can be controlled remotely via RS232 or RS422 interface. The unit takes advantage of Keywest Technology’s SURELOCK digital COMB decoder that allows the BVTBC10 to even work from VHS sources –a real boon for the Armstrong Cable school application.

The analog world
Armstrong Cable is typical of the 8,500 local cable companies throughout the nation that have made a commitment to provide free access to cable service and educational resources via cable and high-speed Internet connections. Like Armstrong cable, these local cable service providers exist in a mixed digital and analog world –and are likely to do so for the foreseeable future.

Particularly when it comes to providing cable service for school channels, the sizable installed base of NTSC television sets will dictate the dominance of analog video in education. “I don’t see the school systems doing anything in the digital world until there are a lot more eyeballs looking at it,” said Hassler. “Right now, most of the sets are analog. I think the school districts are really playing to that audience and right now that is an analog world.”

As long as school districts rely on analog tape machines, school district videos will need to be time base corrected. Like Armstrong Cable, cable operators, broadcasters and those in the post-production community can attest to the inherent limitation of analog videotape recorders when it comes to maintaining an accurate time base and sync. Tape stiction, stretching and the mechanical workings of VTRs have introduced time base errors from the beginning of recorded video and will continue to do so until they play their last analog recording.

Fortunately, Keywest Technology offers a superior 10-bit TBC/frame synchronizer in the BVTBC10 that can handle the needs of video producers and distributors in an affordable way for as long as they continue working in the analog domain.

As Armstrong Cable’s Hassler explained, the BVTBC10 does the job well and does it at a price point that makes sense. “From the beginning,” said Hassler, “we liked what we saw when it came to the Keywest Technology BVTBC10.”

“We were impressed with the performance they deliver and were attracted to the aggressive pricing that fit within our budget for the rebuild,” he added.