Electronic news-gathering
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ENG is a broadcasting (usually television) industry acronym which stands for electronic news gathering. It can mean anything from a lone reporter taking a single camcorder out to get a story, to an entire television crew taking a satellite truck on location to do a live report for a newscast. In its early days, the term ENG was used by newsroom staff to differentiate between the NG (news gathering) crews that collected TV news with traditional film cameras and the new ENG crews who collected TV news with new electronic analogue tape formats like low band 3/4 inch U-matic. The requirement for the differentiation stems from the radically different methods of post-production involved in video versus film. Film needed to be processed before editing, unlike tape where footage could be edited fairly quickly, thus dramatically reducing the turn-around time for a story. The use of film in news gathering virtually disappeared by the end of the 1980s.
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[edit] DSNG
ENG originally referred to the use of point-to-point terrestrial microwave signals to backhaul the remote signal to the studio. In modern news operations, however, it also includes SNG (satellite news gathering) and DSNG (digital satellite news gathering). ENG is almost always done using a specially modified truck or van. Terrestrial microwave vehicles can usually be identified by their masts which can be extended up to 50 feet (15 m) in the air (to allow line-of-sight with the station's receiver antennas), while satellite trucks always use a larger dish that unfolds and points skywards towards one of the geostationary communications satellites.
[edit] Advances
Recently, with the advent of high quality, low latency video encoding for IP (H.264/MPEG-4 AVC or wavelet), lower-cost alternatives to expensive proprietary microwave solutions have entered the market.[citation needed] These are based on COFDM and OFDM technology such as IEEE 802.11 and 802.16. More compact, significantly less expensive systems that use licensed or unlicensed frequencies are becoming available. These systems typically use highly asymmetric network design and rely on technologies such as multicast or RTP over UDP to achieve similar performance to high end-microwave. Since the video stream is already encoded for IP, the video can be used for traditional TV broadcast or Internet distribution without modification (live to air).
[edit] Technical information
In the U.S. there are ten ENG video channels set aside in each area for terrestrial microwave communications, with frequency coordination typically done by the local Society of Broadcast Engineers chapter rather than the FCC. In Atlanta for example, there are two channels each for the four news TV stations (WSB-TV, WAGA, WXIA-TV, WGCL-TV), one for CNN, and another open for other users on request, such as GPB. This situation is in flux, as the FCC is currently seeking to auction off some of the 2 GHz frequency bands.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
Introduction to SNG and ENG Microwave, Jonathan Higgins, Focal Press, 2004; ISBN 0240516621
Satellite Newsgathering, Jonathan Higgins, Focal Press, 2nd Ed. 2007; ISBN 0240519736
