By Ernest O. Tunmann, Tele-engineering Corporation
Considered by many the most important non-subscriber revenue producer of the 1980's, the business of commercial insertion is discussed along its evolutionary milestones of the past two years. Since the insertion of spot commercials depends upon the smooth interaction of technical, operation, marketing and production personnel, it is important that both hardware and software of the commercial insertion equipment satisfies a complex number of desirable features. This paper presents a look at commercial insertion hardware and software from the viewpoint of features. Features are grouped by production, insertion, random access, programming, logging, fail safe, remote operation, expansion, automated billing and management information. Tele-Engineering's family of commercial insert equipment, the AD MACHINE™, the AD CUE 84TM and the AD CUE 100TH systems are then compared to these features to make the user aware of the differences.