EBS/ITFS in San Diego

San Diego County Office of Education

SDCOE is licensed for 11 EBS channels in the San Diego area. Transmission takes place from 3 mountaintops to serve the major population areas. At the present time, four channels transmit to over 400 schools with EBS and also supply 4 cable companies serving 800,000 homes with a main channel via fiber, along with 3 Webcasting channels. Presently, 4 EBS channels have been digitized. There are 7 licensees in the area, consisting of 1 university, 2 community colleges, 3 SDs, and the county office of education who have joined to form Sand Diego County EBS Partners Group to further the advancement of EBS for their students. When completed SDCOE will be the hub for the 24 channel system of the group. The operation center now supplies videotape playback, video server playback, live productions from both our studio and mobile production van remote, and 10 satellite downlinks to provide our programs. At this time, SDCOE uses formats from VCR to DVDs to feed their Sundance automation system. This allows for 6 channels of playback with insertion of promos and PSAs, and 18 channels of timed playback. The Leitch video server system is equipped with 3 terabyte of disk storage using a format to 10 megabytes compression for approximately 360 hours of direct server playback and an additional 7 terabytes of archive storage in DVD-ram format supplying 750 hours of program material. Due to the many formations the system is considered a hybrid of analog and digital.

There are 8 PEG in San Diego County with SDCOE being one of the “must carry.” With over 800,000 cable in homes or 80% of all households, both cable providers (T/W and Cox) have penetrated the market. Fifty one percent of households have high-speed IP.

While EBS is used mostly as “customized programming,” other technology concentrates on other programming like professional development or instruction in Spanish via web streaming and live –call in shows about homework or remotes on cable. With a staff of 15 full timers, SDCOE keeps instructional programming at the fingertips of county teachers and specialists. Heidi Schalger, SDCOE Programming Supervisor, says that EBS lets special programs to be transmitted directly to those teachers who request it. For example, Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech was used through the benefits of the closed circuit nature of EBS. Future goals in EBS as it becomes digital include pushing lessons, notices, or even emergencies directly to whatever device parents, students, and staff have access.