It is called "camera in a box," or the "talking head video reporter."
Some television executives, like Eason Jordan, a chief news executive for CNN, see it as a major breakthrough in international reporting that will make it possible for a single correspondent to transmit live pictures and reports from the "most remote hellholes of the world." Some critics, like Philip Seib, author of "Going Live: Getting the News Right in a Real-Time, Online World," worry that it's "just another technological toy" with the potential to take us "farther away from good journalism." Whatever it's called, people in the television news business are talking about the hand-held, luggage-size package of television technology officially known as the TH-1, manufactured by the British company 7E Communications. They've been talking about it since April 11, when CNN used the technology to broadcast live pictures and coverage of crew members of a downed U.S. spy plane leaving China for home. It wasn't just a television exclusive; the CNN images provided by the "talking head" technology were also reported on newspapers' front pages the next day.
"It changes the game," says CNN's Jordan. "You can do it the old way and spend $500,000, with 20 to 40 cases of equipment weighing half a ton--if you can even get all of that into a country like Afghanistan or China. Or, you can spend $15,000 max on this package of equipment that you can store in an overhead rack of a small plane or on the car seat next to you, and get real-time pictures with it from anywhere on the planet."
Frank Governale, vice president of news operations for CBS News, says there are alternatives to the TH-1 used by CNN. But he agrees with Jordan on the radical differences in price and size between this kind of TV technology and what came before--and on the relatively new ability for a correspondent to broadcast live pictures from anywhere in the world.
"Anywhere in the world as long as you have an opening to the sky, you can get pictures out," Governale says. "But there is nothing proprietary about the technology. While it's gotten better and better, the basic technology itself is not really new. Basically, it's really just a teleconferencing unit. We had teleconferencing units in Baghdad [during the Persian Gulf war in 1991]."
