BOISE -- Sunday was an historic day at Idaho's Newschannel 7, with the unveiling of a brand new look in full 1080 high definition.
It's no small task changing an entire television station's broadcast operation from standard definition to high definition.
Every piece of equipment, every cable, every switch had to be swapped out, amounting to thousands of hours by the production and engineering teams over the course of the last 12 months.
All of it to make watching news a better experience for you and your family.
"Brand new production switcher, brand new audio board, and actually this only represents a fraction of the equipment," said Paul Budell, KTVB director of production and engineering. "Underneath our feet is where a lot of the hardware, computers, playback systems, graphics systems reside. It's taken a bunch of hardware, a bunch of computers to get it all tied together so that we can go from the camera out in the field to the control room through the edit systems, all the way to the transmitter up on the hill in HD."
KTVB has gone through a number of "firsts" in the 6 decades we've been on the air here. And being the "first" in the region to broadcast newscasts in full 1080 high definition was a priority for KTVB President and General Manager Doug Armstrong.
"We've always tried to match and paste what the viewers want," Armstrong said. "Back in 2008, we were the first to adopt digital wide screen technology, and we've waited until now for high definition because frankly we wanted to do it right. There are different levels of high definition all the way from 720 to 1080 and we wanted to take it to the very top, to have the very best quality we could put out there because frankly the viewers want it that way. So we're going full 1080 high definition."
