After fourteen years WPBF is replacing their news set. A reader tells us he saw anchors mention the transition during a newscast yesterday. The newscasts are airing from a temporary set while the new one is going up. WPBF says their renovation will give them “the most fully functional state of the art Television set and studio in all of South Florida.”
What they mean by this we don’t know yet. It is possible that the station is finally switching to HD after parent company Hearst put a freeze on all HD upgrades not long ago.
I’ll speculate that WPBF’s new set will look a lot like what other Hearst-owned stations, namely WESH, WCVB and KOAT have received recently. It also probably won’t be a two-story newsplex style set. Hearst’s other station had their sets designed, built and installed by FXGroup so there’s no reason to believe otherwise now. We’ll just have to wait and see
Video tour of KOAT’s set after the jump
/hat tip reader gbmiami86/
Here is a link to WCVB here in Boston
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7UKmashlMw
Believe it or not, despite their newsroom set upgrade WPBF is not going HD, at least not at this time.
I dunno….they do have HD cameras in their studio, but then so does CBS 4 in Miami.
If you look at the pictures they have added of their set construction, it will indeed look like KOAT, WCVB and WESH. So they will also have an HD capable set.
I’m guessing that if they don’t go HD then it is a control room issue. They just simply may need upgrades in there before they can produce their news in HD.
Odd, since WPBF was one of the first stations in the nation to get equipment to air syndicated HD programming.