BETHLEHEM, Pa.—The Service Electric Network (SEN) is the television production arm of Service Electric Cable TV and Communications, a third-generation family-owned company. The company was founded in 1948 by John Walson with the goal of bringing TV service to the Lehigh Valley through what was then described as a “community antenna television system”—and today called “cable television.”
The company has since expanded into telephone and broadband internet service and operates a live production arm with three mobile units for regional news, sports and event coverage, including local concerts.
Triple A Production
Situated about one hour north of Philadelphia, the Lehigh Valley is home to several minor league sports teams associated with professional Philadelphia teams. Service Electric Network broadcasts all home games for the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs, the Triple A baseball affiliate of the Philadelphia Phillies, and the Lehigh Valley Phantoms, the Philadelphia Flyers’ AHL team. Our three mobile units are deployed to the local venues, where we use Hitachi Kokusai cameras for our live production workflow.
Our friends at Hitachi Kokusai would agree that SEN is an anomaly in today’s media environment because we remain a regional entity that continues to grow and prosper despite not being part of a large media conglomerate.
And because of that independence, we also have the freedom to consider the best technology for our organization when it comes to price and performance. Eight Hitachi SK-UHD7000 4K/HD cameras were among our more recent purchases, which we have since added to our mobile units to replace long-serving Hitachi Kokusai SK-HD1200 cameras.
The SK-HD1200 is an outstanding camera with excellent HD performance and image quality, and we continue to use three of these cameras for studio productions. As sports production tends to be on the leading edge for broadcast quality and resolution, upgrading to the SK-UHD7000 made perfect sense.
Hitachi Kokusai has engineered a dual-4K/HD system that somehow provides even greater image quality and lifelike visuals with exceptional color reproduction, thanks in part to its greater atmospheric sensitivity.
On the technical side, the cameras incorporate three 2/3 CMOS image sensors with global shutter technology, which minimizes unwanted artifacts such as flickering in banding, which occurs from asynchronous lighting sources inside event venues.
The SK-UHD7000 cameras also improve production quality for our high school sports programming, important to local high school sports fans.
Path to 4K
The futureproof design of the camera is perhaps of most value. While we achieve outstanding HD quality productions today, the SK-UHD7000 offers a dual 4K/HD workflow, along with separate controls for HDR and SDR, making us well-prepared for a 4K/HDR future as we gradually upgrade our broadcast and production infrastructure and workflow.
I have worked at SEN since 2001 and we have used Hitachi Kokusai cameras throughout my tenure. As general manager since 2019, I stick with the brand not only because of the quality it brings to our productions and viewers, but also because of the very fair price point and exceptional customer service.
Product reliability is strong, and we rarely require technical support—though they are responsive when needed. The quality of our programming is what keeps people subscribing to SEN, which is of utmost importance as an independent media entity. Hitachi Kokusai cameras help us translate our level of commitment and broadcast quality to our subscribers. l
To learn more about Hitachi Kokusai, contact Ken Cyr at kenneth.cyr@hitachikokusai.us or visit www.hitachikokusai.com.
