Can I add text messages to TV signal

[Catfish2939]

We have a couple TV's in the breakrooms at my work. These TV's are hooked up to cable and employees may watch what they want during breaks and lunch. I would like to add a small scrolling message area to the screen. I could put company announcments and info on them.
Does anyone know of the equipment or software needed. I don't want these messages to interupt regular viewing.

Any info would be appreciated.

[Pony99CA]

We have a couple TV's in the breakrooms at my work. These TV's are hooked up to cable and employees may watch what they want during breaks and lunch. I would like to add a small scrolling message area to the screen. I could put company announcments and info on them.
Does anyone know of the equipment or software needed. I don't want these messages to interupt regular viewing.

Any info would be appreciated.
Personally, I despise crawls like this; they should only be used for emergencies.

That said, if you want a crawl to appear while people are watching TV, you have two choices -- overlay the text on the picture (possibly covering some of the picture), or shrink the TV picture and have a dedicated crawl area (causing some distortion of the picture).

I would guess there are plenty of character generator programs that could do this. You'll probably need a PC or a dedicated box hooked up between the cable and the TV which processes the video and adds the characters. These probably won't be cheap, however, especially if you buy a dedicated box from a video company.

Try doing a :google: search on some combination of broadcast character generators text crawl. Sorry I can't be of more help; if I were still into video production, I'd probably know the names of several companies that did this.

Steve

[maximus]

That said, if you want a crawl to appear while people are watching TV, you have two choices -- overlay the text on the picture (possibly covering some of the picture), or shrink the TV picture and have a dedicated crawl area (causing some distortion of the picture).


Overlay is much better. Some TV stations downhere actually shrink (both horizontally and vertically). Then they put advertisements on the vertical side, and crawler on the horizontal side. That is so annoying. My 29" TV practically became a 21".