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Why Fully Automated Television Is A BAD IDEA! Anywhere!

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Eyes Of A Generation.com


Why Fully Automated Television Is A BAD IDEA! Anywhere!

The good news is, this blooper reel was put together by human hands. The bad news is, that’s about all they get to touch at BBC News, as the whole system is automated, and here are some of the embarrassing results of that decision.

The biggest problem at the BBC isn’t the camera robotics…it’s the fact that they are using full control room automation! Producers have to put computer code in the scripts that tells the cameras where to be, whose microphone is on, what clips to play, what supers to lay in, etc. It’s pretty remarkable when it works, but all it takes is one forgotten cue or mistaken code number to screw everything up. And once one thing gets screwed up, it tends to snowball.

Thanks to Andy Rose for the clip and help. Can “Sky Net” be far behind? Let’s hope not, and that the BBC “innovation” isn’t contagious. It’s like Ebola for TV. Enjoy and share! -Bobby Ellerbee

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hkBAmn5yKo

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25 responses to “Why Fully Automated Television Is A BAD IDEA! Anywhere!”

  1. Johane Haineault

    Epic fail…!! …C’est pathétique.

  2. Warren Allgyer

    Stunning sets and graphics. I am just glad stuff like this never happened when we did the show manually…… NOT.

    I remember in particular one night ….. at 10 minutes to air, when the PA was ripping and collating 7 part scripts into 7 different stacks for an hour show (maybe 30-40 pages each???) and I needed to set up the portable microwave in the newsroom window. I opened the window…. a gust of wind came in…. and 200 pages plus of scripts for the anchors, director, producer, and teleprompter blew off the table and across the newsroom.

    You just can’t have fun like that anymore!

  3. Charles MacDonald

    after watching that video, I wonder what the chances of some newscaster getting whacked in the head while sitting quietly reviewing their script while waiting for the on-air bit and a camera whips around doing a phantom cue.

  4. Marc Wielage

    And the BBC just CUT their budget by millions of dollars, so there’ll be more robots running cameras and directing shows in 2015.

  5. Richard Marino

    not very funny, here is one that is funny https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiawq_7Q6Ak

  6. Bob Sewvello

    I hardly ever see mess ups on American television news. Is this more of a British problem?

  7. Gus Polly

    Our station group installed OverDrive at the first two stations they converted to HD… and went human-punch on the rest

  8. Edward Dowdy

    The US railroad industry has been using remote control computer operated locomotives in switching operations since 2001. Makes me all warm and fuzzy.

  9. Bob Batsche

    Just who gets the blame pinned on their butt for this type of error and/or screwup?

  10. Carol Jackson

    why so many of us are out of work

  11. Thomas Dooley

    I remember when a “sequencer” automation took over WTOP-TV in Washington back in 1975 and could not be immediately turned off. It ran all the tape machines and film islands at once, then held the station hostage (no override) until them literally had to cut the power as it was hard-wired into the system.

  12. Bruce A Johnson

    The Fox affiliate (Sinclair, of course) here in Madison recently outsourced their master control to a sister station in Milwaukee. I was watching the Seattle – Philadelphia football game yesterday, and they went to break and mauled FOUR spots, at one point going to the Fox Sports show slate for a good minute. Wonder how much those 4 makegoods will cost?

  13. Dennis Martin

    I thought Christmas reels were supposed to be funny. That wasn’t funny at all just sad

  14. Gary Rigsby

    It’s all about the dollar. Computers don’t get sick days, matching 401k’s, a portion of their health insurance paid…you get the picture. A station where I live recently replaced a long time system with workers with pulses. The on-air result? Consistently clean shows. Everything old is new again.

  15. Michael Hayne

    no fuzzy logic…

  16. Matthew R Poff

    It’s already here. *sigh* 🙁

  17. Brian Keith Read

    Anything to save a few pennies in the short term, even if many dollars are lost when it doesn’t work. This is what happens when people who don’t have television backgrounds get into the drivers seat and start making bad decisions.

  18. Dave Sica

    I am old school: I insist on having a real live camera operator make those bad shots.

  19. Dwight Sturtevant

    MAY 1988 ONE recent Saturday night, Connie Chung, the anchor of the weekend version of ”NBC Nightly News,” was reading an urgent story about the Middle East, when she began to disappear.
    The studio camera had inexplicably begun to move from its position, pushing Ms. Chung’s image
    from the screen as it glided across the studio floor. Ms. Chung might
    have motioned to the cameraman, except there was no cameraman. The
    source of her distress was a robot, one of NBC’s new self-operating
    cameras, that had apparently gotten a case of wanderlust.
    The unusual incident was Ms. Chung’s personal introduction to the new age of cost efficiency in network television, ((Very Shotly after they instalation they were remove as maintance cost were higher than having a Studio Crew))

  20. Scott Comstock

    That’s seriously messed up. They expect their producers to essentially be computer programmers?

  21. Wally Roper

    I guess this is a real serious problem..

  22. Andrew Palser

    Can be a horror show. Any late changes can mess up the whole thing. News should ideally be locked down an hour in advance. Breaking story……crash.

  23. Bob Sewvello

    There are dozens of people running around and they can’t have four people operating the cameras?

  24. Matthew Harding

    I went on a BBC studio tour a couple of years ago and they explained how the weather forecast broadcasts are done. As I recall, there’s nobody in studio apart from the presenter who logs onto a computer that recognises their password. Cameras then automatically adjust to preset height of presenter and lights adjust to a preset to suit their colouring. No autocue though as the BBC weather presenters are meteorologists and it’s easier for them to talk off the cuff within the given time as it’s their own subject.

  25. Steve Finkelmeyer

    It’s gotten to the point they’re just posting the screwups to YouTube themselves. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jHsoauynPM

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