The media technology team that wants to introduce high definition to T&T. From left, Juan Punyed Sony’s regional sales manager; Gabriel Lara Sony senior sales engineer for the Caribbean and Latin America; Jordi Verite CEO of the Verite Group, and Trinidad-born Clive Ramjattan president of Leading Edge Exporters Inc. Photo: Karla Ramoo
BY SANDRA CHOUTHI Imagine looking at Panorama pannists, Carnival masqueraders or a football match on television in high definition.
Introducing high definition technology to T&T is the objective that brought a business team comprising the Sony Corporation and the Verite Group to these parts.
The five-man team includes Trinidadian Clive Ramjattan, president of Leading Edge Exporters Inc, which exports industrial products.
During a visit to Trinidad Publishing Company Ltd last week, Jordi Verite, president and CEO of the Verite Group, said they came to T&T to explore opportunities to bring “new, high definition broadcasting” to the islands.
“We believe this is a great opportunity for us to do business here as there’s so much happening here—cultural, Carnival, music, football,” Verite said.
Juan Punyed general sales manager of Sony Latin America, said, “What we want to bring is possibility. We have new products, new technology, the possibility for Trinidad to go into high definition. We have the equipment, the products: cameras, camcorders, recorders.”
That means media houses making the transition from tape to disc and then to solid state data recorder, which are high performance data recorders utilising removable flash memory.
Apart from visiting Curacao, the technology team described T&T as key to introducing high definition to these parts largely based on the November 5 general election and a growing economy.
Ramjattan said there are plans to open by next June an office off French Street, Woodbrook, so that Sony and Verite can provide back-up service and repairs for those television stations that want to get into the “high definition scenario.”
“Basically, we’ll have a one-stop shop in Trinidad,” said Ramjattan, who graduated with an economics honours degree from UWI.
He said they will be putting a team of local engineers together to do the repairs locally, which will reduce time and cost.
One of Ramjattan’s lecturers was Dr Ralph Henry, who lectured on effective technology transfer from developed countries to developing ones.
Ramjattan insisted to Sony that effective technology transfer must mean selling the hardware and software and training locals to repair the equipment.
Punyed said consumers will be able to receive content, production, video, film, at a much higher resolution than they now see.
Some people may already have some DVD players that can do high definition.
He said in the near future the resolution capacity will be doubled so that the signal looks crispier, nicer and better.
How soon consumers are able to enjoy such technology depends on the right people making the right decisions, Verite said.
The team met with officials from three other media houses and a production company.
What is HDTV? High-definition television (HDTV) is a digital television broadcasting system with greater resolution than traditional television systems. HDTV is digitally broadcast, because digital television requires less bandwidth if sufficient video compression is used.
http://guardian.co.tt/archives/2007-12-06/business1.html
