Easier said than done. SCA will continue to struggle to sell TV assets and may not be able to do so. I think SCA left it too late.
4 Likes
Instead of crossing straight to the 1pm news after the vice presidential debate today bloody SCA decided to run the local news update at the top of the hour followed by three community service announcements then crashing into the news at about 3 past.
Surely they could have ran local updates and ads at the end of the debate instead of the top of the hour.
7 Likes
Iâm glad someone else noticed this. This happens so often on SCA its not funny.
And to make it better it was the Morning update and it aired at 12:40.
4 Likes
The joy of outsourced playout where no-one takes the blame and mostly no-one cares anymore.
In my day, phone calls and royal inquisitions would result if 2 seconds of unscheduled black would go to air, a very different and very distant era now. Well before automation and outsourcing took over where now no-one is overtly watching what goes out anymore sadly. More so when a single duty operator could be switching upwards up 15 to 30 playlists with no easy ability to see everything when it goes wrong, let alone monitor audio with their ears for each market they switch at same time, a human impossibilty. Well and truely over it and out of it, happily so.
7 Likes
They have local news quotas that would normally get fulfilled during that block of programming but due to the vice presidential debate they probably couldnât get those usual commitments away (including the CSAs no doubt).
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AFAIK there is no rule that says the local content has to air at specific times - just that enough minutes have to be produced each week.
They shouldâve scheduled the updates during the 1st ad break.
5 Likes
Indeed but no excuse - it was clumsy. They had a good 15 minutes or so of CBS analysis they would have been better playing over.
3 Likes
Or they couldâve just slotted it in the first ad break of the lunchtime news.
4 Likes
Obviously TEN must have changed timing on the run and the SCA duty operator at the current outsource playout provider either did not pick up the change and it was possibly not communicated from TEN. My understanding TEN stopped supplying an active schedule stack many years ago, so the 2 remaining affiliate playout centres are now totally reliant on communication from TEN when any timing changes occur. Also, TEN may have left a network cue in their playlist by error when actioning changes on the run possibly resulting in the SCA content being triggered when it should not have. We will never know, and more to the point mostly do not care anymore.
4 Likes
SCA implemented a website on its internal system around 2019ish where you had to log in, log out, tick boxes like âhave you seguedâ, âhave you checked logsâ, âhave you checked any macros needed for shiftsâ, âhave you had a shit and a cough todayâ etc etc so you could be held responsible for any minor misdemeanor that happened on your shift (mostly to cover the arses of the people whose job it was to formguide and because they were higher up than you, was no way they could take the blame for their fuck-ups.)
We did it diligently for a month or so in Newcastle then always conveniently âforgetâ.
I know many regional breakfast talent still filled it in daily - I always meant to ask them why.
This obviously for radio, but Iâm told TV had one, or was planning to have something similar introduced.
3 Likes
TV had checklists, and checklists to check the checklists, but no electronic system for it. By 2019, TV playout staff were counting down to the redundancies and I canât imagine there would have been a spirit of cooperation if more onerous electronic checklists were dumped on them.
I think management were a bit terrified that staff would leave before the redundancies. Making life harder for staff was, wisely, not high on the priority list at the time.
I know my department, which was in a similar boat, was offered a fair amount of latitude during that period. Recruiting replacement staff (let alone getting them trained) would have been an impossible task.
2 Likes