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Ski-cam broadcasts snow business

Feb 1, 2001 12:00 PM, Trevor Boyer

As if the lure of ditching work and hitting nearby ski slopes wasn't already strong enough for Denver residents, now powdery temptation is served fresh with the morning news.

This month, Winter Park Resort in Winter Park, Colorado, begins sending images of local weather conditions to KMGH-TV in Denver. The station will re-broadcast the footage as part of its morning weather report.

The resort chose Innova-Com's TransPEG 100 system to compress the images and send them to the ABC affiliate over T1 lines. Images are also delivered via streaming media to the resort's website (www.winterparkresort.com) and two other sites.

Shawn Johnson, the resort's Internet marketing manager, recognizes that there is novelty appeal to the project. "We thought the `neat factor' could be kind of fun," he says.

More practically, though, Winter Park Resort hopes that providing images to the local news station will increase its visibility at a time when Johnson says interest in skiing is waning slightly.

To capture the video, the camera, a Hitachi HVD-15 with zoom, pan, and tilt capabilities, is mounted on the roof of the slope-facing Winter Park Mountain Lodge. Johnson notes that the camera's zoom function allows a wide range of viewing possibilities. "From our particular vantage point," he says, "you can see sunrises over the Continental Divide, as well as see skiers on mountains."

Burst Communication of Englewood, Colorado, the principle project coordinator, is integrating the system for Winter Park Resort. Last year, the company coordinated a similar video project for Vail Resorts, also in Colorado. That project also employed a TransPEG 100 system, this time to expand distribution of the resort's KVBA-TV signal "down valley" to other areas of the state.

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.