Introduction

CueTech Teleprompting Inc. is a California based teleprompting company with more than 15 years experience in the business. They provide professional teleprompting services to the television and film industry in Hollywood, working on such television shows as American Idol, Dancing with the Stars and award shows such as the Emmys and the MTV Movie Awards.

Problem: Legacy DOS System

A teleprompting company receives scripts for television and movie shoots and then displays them word-by-word in front of the television/movie camera for the actor or presenter to read. For many years, CueTech has used a DOS application called Orator to manage and display scripts.

Orator is a single-user system. The single-user nature of Orator made complicated award show setups quite difficult to manage because script changes had to be physically copied between computers using a floppy disk.

Orator was written more than 15 years ago and depends on old video standards, which modern hardware no longer reliably support. CueTech was finding it increasingly difficult to find computers capable of running Orator. Without Orator, their business would not function.

Challenge: Reliability & Performance

A replacement was needed for Orator, but any such replacement would have to be incredibly reliable and performant. The environment for a teleprompting system is very intense. A show such as American Idol is live-to-air. If anything goes wrong, it will be broadcast to millions of people live. Any errors are absolutely unacceptable. Reliability is tantamount.

When the talent is reading prompted text, it must be scrolled extremely smoothly. If the scrolling jitters at all, then this may distract the onscreen talent and cause them to stutter. This requires real attention to system performance and stability.

Solution

Action Point developed a custom application called Orator 2 (O2). O2 renders prompted text using Managed DirectX in order to control output on any number of computer monitors, allowing a single computer to control multiple prompters. The Managed DirectX system had to be carefully written to ensure it would scroll as smoothly as possible.

Orator 2 employs a network subsystem to allow any number of staff to collaborate in realtime on the manipulation of a show script in a failsafe manner. Any computer can fail and the shared script will be unaffected.

Orator 2 has proven to be a robust solution to the legacy problems CueTech were facing, and has allowed them to move their business forward to the latest generation of hardware and software.

Technologies Used

C# WinForms, Managed DirectX, DotNetMagic, TCP/IP

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