August Challenge - Hidden

Day 21 of DDW's August daily challenge - Hidden

One of the current projects that I am working on concerns the Cue-Dot that you can see at the top of your TV screen just before a commercial break on some live programmes. It's very simple technology to do it, and very manual as it depends on a person pressing a button at one end, and someone else responding at the other end and also pressing a button a few seconds later. Nothing needed apart from the bit of kit to put the cue dot in (about £2-3k). It's simple, relatively cheap and 100% reliable (if the people remember to press the button).

Now that everyone has flat screens (or watch on a PC) they can all see the cue dots and do unreasonable things like going to put the kettle on or popping out to the loo just before the sponsorship bumper, which reduces the number of viewers and hence the value of the sponsorship. So I have been looking at how a hidden cue dot can get sent alongside the live picture and sound and be guaranteed to arrive no matter where in the world the programme comes from, and how many different suppliers it passes through on it's way back here, where each one of them has the opportunity to lose it. Added into the mix is the requirement for it to get to 4 (sometimes 5) different destinations, each of which has a different delay, and at least a main and reserve path, which again have different delays. A lot of people keep coming up with ideas, but we can shoot all of them down quite easily as there is always a case where they wouldn't work accurately or reliably enough.

We have an interim solution that we are currently testing (and hitting plenty of issues with) and also a longer term solution that should be more reliable but that needs 10 man months of development time. Currently, the costs are looking a little high, our interim solution at the worst case is heading for £100k (to replace a £2-3k piece of kit), and the long term solution is even higher than that, so there's no final guarantee that the cost will be acceptable. All that to keep the cue dot hidden!

It's beginning to seem like September is well and truly here already, as I've been very busy in the evenings for the last couple of weeks, just as though everything has started up again, or at least that's my excuse for being late uploading this!