Cheapest Ad Insertion Technology?

[henry]

Howdy all!

I have a client who is starting a cable TV channel. He wants to know what the easiest/cheapest method is for automatically allowing his subscribers to insert local ads.

I was telling him about radio cue tones, but I'm completely lost in the TV world I am slowly finding myself in.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Prais]

A minimum wage tv geek kid works well. I was that kid for a while.

 

[nmoore6676]

Howdy all!

I have a client who is starting a cable TV channel. He wants to know what the easiest/cheapest method is for automatically allowing his subscribers to insert local ads.

I was telling him about radio cue tones, but I'm completely lost in the TV world I am slowly finding myself in.

Thanks in advance!

Like it or not he is going to have to use whatever everyone else is using.

Posted by: Prais
Insert Quote
A minimum wage tv geek kid works well. I was that kid for a while.

A worthy suggestion but unlike TV stations which may have some kind of warm body in master control, at least part of the day, with Cable you are dealing with thousands of unattended headends and it will have to conform to whatever they now use. I have been out of it for several years and during my time we used DTMF tones sent on the audio channel to trigger the local insertion equipment. No one does THAT anymore but the method has to be compatible with headend standards.

 

[Markxxx]

According to Lisa Simpson:

The intern thing could open up a whole new world of free labor for you. Did you know the Discovery Channel doesn't have a single paid employee

 

[davect]

1) Standard DTMF tones.
2) Relay trigger command embedded in digital signal.
3) Exact time breaks.

 

[oldtimeradio]

Wasn't those tones (similar to what we hear on the RTV programming) relagated to an audio sub-channel to keep it out of the program audio? As an avid cable TV watcher back in the 80's I remember hearing those tones prior to the local break. Later on, I became aware that those tones had disappeared and put on a sub-channel to cue the cable systems.

Mike