by Mike Hansel
Howdy boys and girls and welcome to Mike’s Realtime Roundup – a place where I take questions real or imagined and answer them to the best of my ability.
What does TOC stand for?
Technical Operations Center or Totally Offerman Command, either is correct.
Why so many monitors in your office?
With a network of 100 realtime writers from dozens of states, the primary focus of the TOC is to schedule, coordinate and monitor captioning feeds. The rumors of it being used as an off-track betting site are completely unfounded.
How many hours of realtime captioning are there per month?
The realtime department has grown from just a few hours a month to thousands of monthly hours. Our target is one billion billion hours per millennia.
How many people work in the TOC?
We are staffed 24 hours a day. We have at least 5 working in the Burbank TOC. Nate, who does scheduling, billing and heavy lifting, works in Minneapolis. There is always someone working realtime, 24/7/365.
What exactly do you guys do in the TOC?
I get this question a lot. As a matter of fact, Gerald asked me just yesterday, “Mike, what the heck are you doing!” Along with monitoring of captioned programming, we also do scheduling, troubleshooting, and routing of captioning.
What is routing?
The primary way caption data is delivered is by phone lines. The writers send the data from their computer to the client captioning encoder using a modem. Sometimes the clients ask us to send the data to two or more encoders so the TOC connects to the encoders via modem and has the writer connect to the TOC. We then route the data from writer to the encoders requested by the client. For more information regarding how realtime captioning works see the excellent FAQ pages at www.captionmax.com.
Coming soon…a look back at the history of Hayes modem commands in “Where AT? They Now?”