Twenty Memories from Twenty Years

PROLOGUE: Dec. 1, 2019, marked my 20th anniversary at Cox Communications. This is the sixth in a series of posts throughout the month highlighting people and projects that have become the soundtrack of my professional journey. Enjoy!

Part 6 - Getting High-Def with a Little Help from My Friends

Back in 1997, The Onion hailed the impending high-def revolution with a satire piece that proved moderately prophetic while poking some fun at the television industry:

"By the year 2005...90 percent of American homes will watch their favorite mind-numbing swill on a high-definition TV."

For Cable TV advertising companies, the proliferation of HD sets and the rapid expansion of HD program content throughout the early part of the millennium created a need for infrastructure improvements. Fueled in large part by sports fans, viewers were migrating to high-definition -- and we needed to help our advertisers keep pace with the changes.

Because I was familiar with the potential implications from the audience measurement perspective, I was a charter member of our HD planning team. Before long, my role had expanded to include areas with which I was far less familiar. Eventually, as we embarked on a multi-year "path to parity" in terms of our HD ad-insertion capabilities, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to manage a company-wide capital funding effort that would come to be known internally as "Project Monarch."

To navigate the project effectively, I had to get up to some semblance of speed on a variety of technical aspects. Luckily for me, we had a stellar team of local and regional operations managers who were extremely gracious in explaining (and occasionally re-explaining) to me the nuances of inserters, splicers, bandwidth, simulcasts, verification, and the video backbone.

The list of people who gave of their time and expertise to help us successfully expand our HD capabilities is too long to list here, but Mary Elmore deserves special mention for her patience and guidance. Our Northeast operations manager at the time, Mary was a long-time colleague who was my go-to whenever I was unsure of what to ask when of whom. Thanks to Mary and numerous others, Project Monarch eventually floated like a butterfly.