Amy Villarreal

President, General Manager

Growing up in Texas, my family lived on the first street in our town to get cable, but my parents had already decided they were not going to pay to watch television. It was 1980 and we were still watching a black and white television – and it didn’t have a remote control. At that time MTV was just launching, so as any teenager might do, I would just go to my best friend's house to watch the next phase of television explode.

It was exciting times as we experienced another transition in television. However, no huge advances in the actual picture quality had happened until 1981 when President Reagan was presented an HDTV demonstration based on the system in Japan. He officially declared it "a matter of national interest" to introduce HDTV to the USA, and a new journey began for every broadcaster in America. Suddenly the reality hit that everything that we use to broadcast every single day will soon have to be replaced. And, of course, it all has to be seamless to the viewer. In April 1997, CBS in New York started broadcasting test signals from the Empire State Building as the first High Definition TV sets went on sale in 1998.

Well 11 years later HDTV has arrived in Austin, Texas. HDTV is the most exciting part of America's transition from the 65-year-old analog TV broadcasting system to an all-digital system. There are hours and hours of HDTV programs on every night of the week, including KEYE’s own newscasts. Some viewers see the message of CBS 42 news in HD and mistakenly think they're seeing HDTV on their 15-year-old set. It's not quite that simple, and it was certainly not that simple for us. Our engineers came up with a strategy to make CBS 42 the first station in Austin to become HD. After 10 years and millions of dollars that vision came to life on November 1, 2007 when we went on the air at 5pm with the first HD newscast in the city.

This is an exciting time for this industry as we are reinventing ourselves once again. We currently broadcast CBS 42 in High Definition on 42-1 (1531 on cable) and Retro Television Network, a network of classic shows from the 60’s and 70’s, on 42-2 (1532 on cable). Before long we will have the ability to have another two channels over the air. If you have never watched High Definition over the air with a simple antenna, I encourage you to take the time to do it. The quality of the picture that is provided everyday for free over the air trumps the picture that is compressed over cable. I look forward to February 18, 2009 – a full 28 years after President Reagan saw the first HD transmission – and I hope you’ll enjoy it as well.