One of the best ways to convey critical, up-to-date information to your community is by running a text crawl ticker on your channels. All HyperCaster AIO models support native text crawls across all channels, including when Simulcasting in HD on the Internet and SD on cable. HyperCasters with external ProVues, HyperCaster B100-SDI, and B100-ANALOG models also support text crawls when licensed for graphic overlays.
To make it easy for key personnel, administrators, or the Office Of Emergency Management to quickly trigger a text crawl, the HyperCaster supports a special Emergency User and corresponding Emergency Console. Admins can set up Emergency Users who only have access to the Emergency Console. Emergency Users can login from any connected web browser or mobile device. The Emergency Console allows:
- Entering the text information to crawl on the channels
- Selecting on which channels to run the crawl
- Selecting whether to run until manually stopped, or automatically stop at a scheduled time
- Manually stopping an active Emergency
When an Emergency is triggered, the HyperCaster will:
- Automatically suppress and remove all other graphic elements from running to make sure nothing conflicts with the emergency text crawl.
- Automatically email designated users notifying them that an emergency text crawl is on-air along with the details.
- Prominently show that an Emergency is active at the top of every page with a link to see the details.
When an Emergency is ended, the HyperCaster will:
- Automatically restore any previously suppressed graphic overlays that would normally be active.
- Automatically email designated users notifying them the emergency text crawl has been cleared.
- Remove displaying the active Emergency at the top of each page in the user interface.
Admin users can use the Emergency console as well for convenience. Text crawls can also be triggered directly from the Overlays page, or via scheduling. When an emergency is not running, multiple crawls can run at the same time.
In addition to supporting manually entered text, text crawl tickers can also be dynamically driven by most RSS and XML feeds. The Admin can configure RSS and XML feeds to be used for tickers, with the flexibility to tailor which fields you want to appear in the ticker. This is great for displaying local, and real-time news sources.
You can customize the emergency ticker look and feel by using the built-in ticker designer, and designating one of your tickers to be used for emergencies. Otherwise a simple and clean, default, stock ticker design will be used. The HyperCaster ticker designer allows you to create ticker designs completely within the interface selecting location, size, background and border colors, text color, text drop shadow, ticker speed, alpha transparency and more.
For more sophisticated designs and branding, you can optionally upload a foreground and background PNG image that also supports alpha channel.
To take it even one more level, the ticker designer supports optional squeezebacks, whether you want something like an L-bar design, or just squeeze up the video so the ticker runs at the bottom without covering the video area.
When using the HD/SD Simulcast feature, for example to broadcast in HD on the Internet, and SD on Cable, the ticker designer allows you full control to manage the design for each output resolution. This way you upload PNG branding elements designed for 16:9 for your HD path, and 4:3 for your SD path. When a ticker is airing, each output path knows which design elements to use.
Most HyperCaster systems can be configured so all live sources pass through to take advantage of all of the HyperCaster’s processing and graphics capabilities. This means Emergency and other tickers can run during playback, live sources, and community bulletin board, with a single point of management.