WinPlus Remote, an iOS-based teleprompting system that delivers up-to-date scripts anywhere in the world, has been launched by Autoscript. The technology is also suited to remote news bureaux and smaller newsroom operations, and works on an iPhone or iPad.
The software enables a script to be automatically uploaded to an FTP site where it can be downloaded onto an iPad and kept constantly updated. It works in conjunction with the iOS app, picoPrompt, and is supplied with a hand control.
“There have been iPad prompting apps on the market for some time,” said Robin Brown, product manager, Autoscript. “However, the link to the newsroom has been missing, which effectively means that there is no access to live updated scripts on location.” But, WinPlus Remote will mean that users “will always have the latest version of the script on their iPad.”
It has been trialled by Channel 4 News, whose senior programme director, Martin Collett, said: “We worked with Autoscript and picoPrompt to integrate iPad prompting into our workflow. Previously we might have relied on presenters or reporters learning scripts and delivering from memory. Now we can deploy an iPad and simple prompting hardware and get a reliable prompter where otherwise we’d be struggling. There are some clever tricks in the setup that minimise the amount of data transferred during each update, so even on a low bandwidth connection we can still see script updates. We’ve used WinPlus Remote on numerous tricky live assignments with great success.”
Broadcasters don’t need to be WinPlus users. “If a newsroom is running other prompting software, WinPlus Remote can be used in parallel. It effectively runs in the background and enables technicians to take the same script as their current prompting solution and upload it to the FTP site,” explained Brown.
