Pledge Head

Ah... that time of year again. Complicated further by the new FCC rules on closed captioning. They've pretty much done away with live pledge breaks except by stations that have that capability. With all the money we've doled out on digital/hd conversions, automations and servers, who has money for captioning equipment? Especially when we're going to be digging into our pockets again for the next program delivery system before the satellite leases run out in October????

So I sit, cross-eyed in front of my computer, figuring times, scheduling breaks and adding notes all over to add certain keys at certain times to cover our FCC-ruled butts.

In a strange way, it makes my life easier (few live pledge lengths to figure out and more pre-packaged virtuals), and in another it makes it harder (feeds, feeds, and more feeds because the producers out there don't seem to realize that if you caption the bottom of the screen during a pledge break, the phone number gets covered up - and what's the point then? - so the programs go back, and back to be "fixed").

If you don't work in public television, you probably don't understand half of what I just said, but I needed to vent (huff, huff, huff.... long exhaaaaaaale).