INDIANAPOLIS, Ind.— After being sold by Nexstar Media to Circle Broadcasting in 2019, the CW affiliate WISH-TV in Indianapolis, Indiana has been pursuing a strategy of expanding its production of local content and has been relying on technologies from Ross Video to ramp up production and improve graphics. 

The station currently uses XPression, OverDrive and Acuity from Ross Video. 

According to Chris Newman, graphics operations manager at WISH-TV, the change in ownership to Circle City Broadcasting, which is owned by DuJuan McCoy, brought with it a change in focus. 

“DuJuan McCoy is very focused on increasing the amount of local content that we produce and building the local audience,” Newman said. “He has big plans for the station and that means a renewed focus on creative content, efficiently produced.” 

Just prior to the sale of the station to Circle City, Nexstar had been moving to the station to the XPression suite from Ross Video and was developing a new graphics package. Newman, a graphics expert with 20 years experience, noted that Ross helped smooth the transition with educational materials and help from its staff.  

Migrating from one solution to another can often be stressful, but Newman was pleased with the overall process. 

“One of the great advantages of XPression is that every box is a CG generator as well as a clip player – that’s enabled us to cut down on the number of boxes we need and migrate away from our previous clip players,” he said. “I also have to say that Visual Logic has been an amazingly powerful tool. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve started working with a creative idea in Visual Logic and the tool has taken me somewhere else, opening up new doors and producing results that are even better than I’d initially imagined. Then when I’m all done, I can publish the project and all the elements ‘travel’ together with no missing parts.”

With XPression now firmly embedded in WISH-TV’s workflows, Chris Newman has been looking to the future. 

“DuJuan, our owner, has a very progressive outlook and is happy to consider any new technologies or solutions if the business case stacks up and it will help improve our efficiency and the look and feel of our content,” he said. “As an example, we recently purchased the XPression Tessera solution to render graphics on some unusually shaped LED displays we have on-set. It’s dramatically improved the way the graphics look on-screen so that was a worthwhile investment. We are also looking at XPression Maps for our news mapping platform and Streamline for media asset management amongst other things.”

Owner DuJuan McCoy also has ambitions beyond the local Indianapolis area. “DuJuan is creating a new national station called the Multicultural News Network – MNN – focusing on minority ethnic groups here in the US,” Newman said. “The new network will be based in the same building as WISH-TV so it’s going to be an exciting time for us here.”

“We’ve had great success with XPression, OverDrive and Acuity [from Ross], and I’m sure that would only increase if we tapped into other elements of the Ross ecosystem,” Newman added. 

Currently WISH-TV, which is a CW affiliate, offers viewers 76.5 hours per week of local news and local programming and provides around the clock information on its digital platforms. The station serves more than a million households.

INDIANAPOLIS—WISH-TV is a proud affiliate of The CW Network and delivers the latest breaking news under our News 8 brand. Our owner, Circle City Broadcasting, also owns and operates MyNetworkTV affiliate WNDY-TV (“MyINDY-TV 23”), which provides around-the-clock entertainment, sports and local interest programming to central Indiana viewers.

Until recently, all of our closed captioning was done by human transcribers through a closed-caption service company that would dial in to our caption encoders. The huge amount of local news content we produce—up to 12 hours per day—required a lot of dial-ins. With the rates charged by such services, our captioning costs were very high.

We wanted to find a better way of doing our closed captioning. Our main goal wasn’t necessarily to save money, but more importantly to allow us to caption a larger portion of our content in a more cost-effective manner.

THE EVOLUTION OF CAPTIONING

I had looked at automated speech-to-text technologies around eight years ago, but their accuracy wasn’t good enough at the time. Our chief engineer, Glenn Edwards, kept following automated-captioning technology and read a favorable review of ENCO’s enCaption4 system, which would allow us to caption more of our programs for less money than we were paying for dial-in captioning. So we requested a demo unit for a trial. It worked right out of the box and we were impressed with its accuracy.

The first program we used enCaption4 on was the locally produced TV version of nationally syndicated radio show “The Bob & Tom Show,” which started airing on WNDY in October. Since then, we have expanded our use of enCaption4 across both WNDY and WISH.

enCaption4’s REST API gives us a lot of flexibility in setting up our captioning operations exactly the way we want them and controlling enCaption4 through our own custom software. Our IT developer created an application that runs on a Raspberry Pi platform and enables us to easily start and stop the captioning process.

Our homebrew software also uses GPIOs on the Raspberry Pi to trigger the switching of our AJA KUMO router to the desired SDI source for our enCaption4 system, and to connect enCaption4 to the appropriate downstream caption encoder. In this manner, we can use our single enCaption4 system on our choice of the WISH, WNDY or control room signals.

ONE-CLICK PROCESS

In addition to its cost efficiency, enCaption4 has also benefited our stations by allowing us to quickly respond to unexpected, last-minute captioning requests. When our newsroom notifies engineering that they have a breaking news special they need captioned, we can just click a button to start captioning and another to stop it when the report is done. It’s a very fast and easy process, and we can get captioning on-air right away without needing to make arrangements with an external service.

enCaption4 has enabled us to expand our closed captioning to nearly everything we do. Having a machine that can handle all of our captioning needs is like a dream come true. I’m impressed with how far the technology has come over the years, specifically enCaption4. We had long hoped that someone would offer speech-to-text capabilities that work accurately enough for our on-air needs, so we could just hit a button and have it work. ENCO has done that with enCaption4.

Mike Selby is staff engineer at WISH-TV. He can be contacted at mike.selby@wishtv.com.

For more information, visit www.enco.com.

MELVILLE, N.Y.—After previously using ChryonHego’s Channel Box system, Indianapolis-based WISH-TV has announced that it is making the move to the company’s new PRIME Ecosystem for channel branding. The 24-hour news channel made the upgrade to utilize the system’s new rendering capabilities.

WISH-TV used the Channel Box system to send non-newscast information to air automatically during specific programming. One operation the station used it for was the “L bar,” a group of graphics on the left and bottom portion of the screen, which were built by the station’s graphics team. The PRIME system will now build off of Channel Box and add next-generation, future-proof technology, per ChyronHego.

ChyronHego’s Creative Services team will assist WISH-TV with its customization of the PRIME Ecosystem.