Problem: Legacy DOS System

A teleprompting company receives scripts for television and movie shoots and then displays them word-by-word in front of the television/movie camera for the actor or presenter to read. For many years, CueTech has used a DOS application called Orator to manage and display scripts.

Orator is a single-user system. The single-user nature of Orator made complicated award show setups quite difficult to man-age because script changes had to be physically copied be-tween computers using a floppy disk.

Orator was written more than 15 years ago and depends on old video standards, which modern hardware no longer relia-bly support. CueTech was finding it increasingly difficult to find computers capable of running

Challenge: Reliability & Performance

A replacement was needed for Orator, but any such replace-ment would have to be incredibly reliable and performant. The environment for a teleprompting system is very intense. A show such as American Idol is live-to-air. If anything goes wrong, it will be broadcast to millions of people live. Any er-rors are absolutely unacceptable. Reliability is tantamount.

When the talent is reading prompted text, it must be scrolled extremely smoothly. If the scrolling jitters at all, then this may distract the on-screen talent and cause them to stutter. This requires real attention to system performance and stability.