Autocue Announces Installation of QScore System at Major Canadian Broadcaster.

STAMFORD, Conn. -- New Member of the QSeries Family Keeps Sports Fans Up to Date with Up-to-the-Minute Stats on Sporting Events Worldwide

Autocue announced today the implementation of the QScore data ingest and presentation system at one of Canada's leading national sports television broadcasters. QScore is a new application from the Autocue development team and is the latest to be designed collaboratively with a broadcast facility. It enables users to organize and streamline the collection and handling of data, including results and league, team and player statistics, either automatically from a number of sources or manually through user input and then automatically populates customizable caption generator (CG) templates for broadcast during the show.

Autocue developed QScore from a functional specification designed in partnership with the customer's management and production teams in Toronto. "When we were first approached to develop QScore, we realized the significant challenges faced by broadcasters to manage accurate statistics on a daily basis," said Peter Gould, President and CEO of Autocue. "QScore was developed to provide a modern, integrated solution to collect and display massive amounts of incoming data, including results and details from games or competitions."

The implementation was managed by Applied Electronics Limited, Canada's largest broadcast systems supplier and integrator. "Our customer had a specific need to handle statistics efficiently from numerous sporting events simultaneously," said Dave McGinn, News Industry Specialist for Applied Electronics. "Autocue was the only company with the expertise to develop the best solution for this broadcaster."

With QScore by Autocue, operators no longer have to manually load names and other supers into their CGs. Now, integration of QScore into the editorial and production process lets producers build supers within scripts in the QNews Newsroom Computer System (NRCS) using customized templates, which appear as style images on the user's desktop. Each user always knows whether they have the correct template and whether the text fits properly. QScore also auto-generates full screen and lower third game boards with incoming data from the main data provider, Stats Inc.

The customizable features in QScore make it truly unique. No other solution offers the extensive flexibility provided by QScore. Serving up daily game sets from incoming data, QScore populates the applicable assigned templates to produce scoreboards in real-time as the game progresses and eventually finishes, without user intervention. QScore downloads the names of all players from teams in selected leagues, without need for on-site user handling, while allowing manual additions and revisions as necessary. With this feature, QScore auto-completes player names for supers when a user begins typing the name, and even includes the correct team logo.

QScore has also opened up access to the CG device for both news and sports captions. Previously, all news lower-thirds had to be entered directly on the CG, but QScore allows both news captions and sports results to be prepared in advance from the QNews NRCS, or generated automatically based on incoming data, or entered manually through the QScore user interface for the caption operator. This user interface provides a unique level of control over how each caption is displayed, and includes the ability to recall one template with a number of different effects.

With these most recent additions to its suite of products, Autocue is the only company to offer the television industry a single solution for all transmission, newsroom, scripting and prompting requirements. QScore is part of the highly successful QSeries family of advanced production and automation system solutions.

About Autocue

Autocue has been serving the broadcast industry since the mid-1950s when Autocue Ltd. in London and QTV in New York produced and patented the very first prompters. The two companies merged in 1984 and, with the introduction of the QSeries family of software, Autocue became the only company to offer the television industry a single solution for all transmission, newsroom, scripting and prompting requirements and unlike its competitors is the only company to work directly with its customers to optimize newsroom workflow. In the United States, QTV is part of the Autocue group and forms the US division of Autocue's prompting services. Autocue is known worldwide for its service and dependability, serving such prestigious clients as Bloomberg, the BBC and MTV Europe. Autocue's prompting solutions are compatible with all newsroom systems on the market and are used all over the world by broadcasters, production professionals, government facilities and corporate producers requiring excellence in prompting and newsroom automation solutions. For further information, please visit www.autocue.com.

Royal Television Society Technical Innovations Awards 2003 Winner for QScript.