

The Broadcast Clock (2013) - firloop
http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-broadcast-clock/

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imroot
These have been in use for a while -- in 1996/1997, the radio station I worked
for had Satellite clocks that we would use to get into and out of baseball and
football games -- ideally, our schedules would match a hard break on the
clock, and we could just "bump" out of one song and into the program, but,
you'd sometimes have to use fill music, the weather, or, anything else you
could get your hands on to make the time work.

Even then, almost everything was automated; we had Harris consoles where we
could program the 'next' event by hand (and then a button to return control
back to the Harris). Today, the sporting events are sending cue tones for
commercial breaks and top-of-hour legal ID's, negating the need for some 16
year old kid to be making minimum wage listening to baseball and doing his/her
homework at night.

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firloop
An interesting look into the world of public radio programming and time
constraints. While the writeup on the linked page is nice, the podcast itself
is filled with a lot more information.

