|
Question From Kevin Vahey, Jul 25, 2015
Wasn't there a booth announcer who deliberately would say WTEV New Bedford, making the engineers think a relay was cutting out? From Frank Clynes, Jul 28, 2015 I hope our booth announcers weren't that bored for entertainment. The relays were forever cutting out. I do recall an early WTEV experiment in computer-controlled programming, utilizing IBM punch cards. Hundreds of these punched cards would move around on an endless conveyor belt in master control. They'd automatically switch commercials, psa's, local and national feeds. The problem was, the machine took a second or two to get up to speed and another second or two in switching off. A 30 second commercial might be clipped to 26 seconds on air. There was so much "black" on the air, some genius downstairs came up with the idea of selling the dead air. A box was built with a remote camera at one end and an advertisement on a card at the other end. Whenever we went to "black," the commercial printed on the card would pop up on the screen. The sales department would sell these millisecond commercials for a small fee. Because of the high number of technical glitches in any given broadcast day, they was the most watched commercials on WTEV. The chief engineer took exception to the use of a slide that read "Due to Technical Difficulties" whenever something went wrong. He felt it pinned the blame on his department. The slide was charged to "Due to Network Difficulties." That way, ABC got the blame. |
|
If you have comments or additional information on this item. please send eMail to:  Please reference item #wtev0055. |