Dan Stark Selects Autoscript's WinPlus Software

Autoscript has revealed that its WinPlus Newsroom Prompting software has been chosen by Dan Stark, Chief Engineer of NBC station KTVH Helena, as part of the studio's infrastructure.

Stark, who took over a newly-purchased news station, admits that he chose the solution due to its reliability after he experienced equipment failure for live TV – teleprompter software malfunction.

He explained: "I'm in charge of a couple of TV stations and we purchased [KTVH] six months ago. It had old software and since we had initial budget constraints after the station purchase, we ended up taking the built-in software that came as a freebie with the Newsroom Computer System (NRCS). Unfortunately, we had a few issues right off the bat; we had sluggish USB controllers, the software didn't work with many caption encoders, and it would crash every time we needed it. In the end, we didn't have prompting or captioning for a week."

As a result, Stark chose Autoscript's WinPlus solution to prompt and provide data for closed captioning. The WinPlus Newsroom Prompting package is a teleprompting application; it is Unicode compliant – supporting any foreign language that works with Windows – and is also compatible with leading Newsroom systems including Ross Inception, AP ENPS, and Avid i-News.

"I needed something I knew would work. Our other station, KRTV, has had Autoscript for as long as I can remember, so we knew WinPlus would work and had good controllers," Stark continued. "At KTVH, the talent prompts themselves, primarily with a foot pedal. Once the show starts, they are on their own – it either works or it's a wreck. Some of KRTV's talent use Autoscript's wireless hand controller, but the prompting options that came with the NRCS didn't even have a wireless hand controller available."

With WinPlus now incorporated into the station's workflow, the NRCS creates the on-air rundowns and then activates them into WinPlus when they are ready. From there, the prompt feed from WinPlus goes to three on-camera units in the studio and the data content gets delivered to the Link Electronics caption encoder for the closed captioning.

"When I'm thinking about investing in a teleprompting system, I ask three questions: 1) Is it legally compliant with the FCC's regulations, 2) Is it reliable, and 3) Does it function so that the talent can easily see what they're doing without being distracted from controlling it. For me, Autoscript achieves all three flawlessly," Stark concluded.

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(JP/LM)