Basic overview of the role of ENG/SNG

Television newsgathering is the process by which materials, i.e. pictures and sound, that help tell a story about a particular event are acquired and sent back to the studio. On arrival, they may be either relayed directly live to the viewer, or edited (packaged) for later transmission.

The process of newsgathering is a complex one, typically involving a cameraman and a reporter, a means of delivering the story back to the studio, and for live coverage, voice communication from the studio back to the reporter at the scene of the story.

Coverage of a sports event involves essentially the same elements but on a much greater scale. Instead of a single reporter you would have a number of commentators, and instead of a single cameraman, you might have up to thirty or forty cameras covering a major international golf tournament.

Whether it is a news or a sports event, the pictures and sound have to be sent back. This could be done by simply recording the coverage onto tape, and then taking it back to the studio. However, because of the need for immediacy, it is far more usual to send the coverage back by using a satellite or terrestrial microwave link, or via a fibre optic connection provided by, say, the telephone company. Plainly, here we are going to focus on the use of satellite and terrestrial microwave links.

A brief history

Some countries had TV services running in a rudimentary form before the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, but it was only with the continued development of TV after war ended in 1945 that the use of microwave communications evolved. TV pictures from outside the studio were, by and large, originated using film cameras, and the film was brought back to the studio for processing and conversion to a TV picture.

Live coverage was very rare, as although electronic studio cameras could be used to transmit pictures over cable circuits provided by the telephone companies, this was only done for especially important events such as national political elections in the United States, and most notably, the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in the United Kingdom.

Up until the 1970s, 16 mm film was the common means of recording events on location for TV. By 1980, portable electronic cameras and video tape recorders (VTRs) developed in Japan and the United States began to feature in newsgathering, making it ‘electronic’ newsgathering (ENG), and by 1990 one-piece electronic camcorders were in common use. Within a decade, the use of film in TV for event coverage virtually disappeared. As a direct result of radar technology invented during the Second World War, microwave transmitters and receivers were developed and used from the 1950s onwards in the TV industry to transmit pictures and sound from point-to-point.

However, this early transmission equipment was bulky and not particularly reliable, but the development of solid-state electronics (as opposed to the use of vacuum tubes – ‘valves’) through the 1960s established terrestrial microwave link technology for coverage of remote events.

The use of satellite technology began in the late 1970s in the United States, with the development of transportable satellite earth stations (TES) which could be carried on the back of a truck. TV companies had to buy time on the satellites by the minute, and at the time this was particularly expensive – but as we shall see later, well worth it if it means it is the only way an event or story can be covered.

Through the 1980s TES (also called ‘uplinks’) were developed into both truck-based and flyaway forms. A flyaway is an uplink system comprised of boxed units that can be relatively easily transported by air if necessary.

In the 1990s, the use of digital compression developed, which both reduced the size and cost of these transportable systems and enabled broadcasters to use cheaper satellite capacity.

So the use of microwave links evolved from the 1950s through to the 1980s when ENG really came into its own. From the mid-1980s, the use of satellites to cover news and sports events developed to the extent that by the late 1990s, the use of terrestrial microwave for ENG became virtually limited to short-range local coverage of events.

As we shall see later, the development of digital transmission techniques has also breathed new life into the use of terrestrial ENG microwave – termed digital ENG (DENG).