Inside KUAM's closed captioning

We started running a new sponsorship bumper during last night's newscast mentioning how IT&E (my former employer) is now backing our closed captioning services. I've received a fair amount of e-mail since from people who thought it was cool and kept their TVs running in CC mode just to follow along. Some people even commented on how much I personally ad lib and throw in "extra stuff".

I'm so busted.

Others have written, wanting to know how it all works. So here's the secret sauce: our captioning software converts our written scripts to text - verbatim - and displays it in the lower-third of a TV set's screen, assuming the CC mode is enabled. More high-end, more expensive systems, like those used by ESPN, run a hybrid back-end, combining software that displays pre-written text for leads and then switches over to voice synthesis for matching live readovers. I've looked into this a bit and it's really amazing technology.

We've been running captioning newscasts for more than four years, and the obvious target audience, the hearing impaired, has really enjoyed it. But oddly, not that many people outside of the bar crowd realized such was available.