ARLINGTON, Texas—The University of Texas at Arlington is a prestigious research, teaching and public service institution whose mission is the advancement of knowledge and the pursuit of excellence. Our 41,000 students engage in in-person and online coursework supported by real-world experiences throughout our academic, internship and research programs. The Department of Communication at UTA offers a broadcast major where students learn to craft stories that engage and inform.
I’m not only an alumnus of UTA, having earned a master’s degree in communication and media studies, I also joined the faculty in 2008. I have since been developing a bilingual broadcast journalism program that, to this day, has a 100% graduation and job placement rate. I work with Hispanic students under the umbrella of the Hispanic Media Initiative (HMI), a program focusing exclusively on the advancement of Hispanic media Education, journalism, and research.
As a broadcast specialist in the department, I enjoy researching new and emerging media technologies that affect journalism and content-driven industries. My responsibilities at UTA include teaching TV production, broadcast news and making recommendations to ensure our state-of-the-art broadcast environments mirror workflows and systems used by the media industry.
News Production
Our television studio is used to produce Arlington Sentinel News (ASN) and Arlington Sentinel News en Español (ASNE). Given that we work closely with the NBC, Telemundo, Univision, and CBS 11 stations in the Dallas-Fort Worth market, we can’t compromise on the quality of our content and production equipment. We also produce corporate, sports, and entertainment shows, all of which use CueScript for teleprompting as part of our control room converged spaces.
Our studio is powered by Ross Video live production technologies; our Ross Inception News content management system works in concert with CueScript to teleprompt rundowns and bring stories to life. Given CueScript’s ease of integration, students don’t have to worry about how to send content to the teleprompter as it automatically and seamlessly syncs content in real time.
We discovered CueScript in 2014 through a strong recommendation from our systems integrator, Digital Resources Incorporated (DRI). We were looking for a robust prompting system that could be synced and operated directly with Inception News from a dedicated production station. CueScript fit the bill perfectly on both counts.
We focused on having a system that seamlessly integrates with Inception News. We’re able to simply add it to the workflow through IP and content is pushed directly to CueScript. Operationally, one of my favorite features is the prompter’s peripheral wheel, which gives the student control over prompting speed and story lines. This is only amplified by the user-friendly graphic interface.
Plug and Play
Training was minimal—it mainly consisted of configuring the prompter to the operators’ preferences, such as color, aspect ratio, and use of peripherals. The interface made it so straightforward, like plug-and-play or set-it-and-forget-it. It’s a very simple and reliable product. CueScript has everything ready to go.
CueScript is known for their service, and they don’t disappoint. They are consistent and they give us the confidence we need to focus on other projects that require more time and attention. The overall experience has been very positive, and we intend to expand the system going forward.
We’re considering including CueScript pedals and handheld devices, and we’re also looking into SayiT, their voice-activated feature that scrolls text in synchronization with speech, both in English and Spanish.
More information is available at www.cuescript.tv.
