[rkolsen]

Is there any screenshots of the new graphics yet?

I am curious if they’ll look like the Nightly graphics.  But this is an example of the ticker from susquvalleugal on Discord:



For some reason Hearst likes rebuilding the ticker. If they followed the simple guidelines by NBC and the software all they’d do is fix the position of the text/time and temp. As you can see above the back drop is existing already there. To run the ticker it’s a simple .txt file where every line inserts the divider. But there also plugins to receive RSS from the NRCS.

If they updated the ticker and it went out today (with out their backdrop) there would just be text.  Hearst did the same thing with the prior packages. I don’t know why they rebuild the ticker with the backgrounds. My guess is they want things to be dynamic such as using a 3 column weather layout -  but that could be done as a typical text overlay - they already don’t use the NameDropper for ticker purposes it’s connected to Viz, I believe. 

There was a tornado warning at about 8:20 AM and although the cut into Today the ticker remained and disappeared as if they were still taking the broadcast, as you can see here you’ll notice the background they rebuilt.

   

Oh and some packages on NBC O&Os sometimes trigger the ticker  when video from Today appears.  Probably the ancillary data that turns it on/off is still encoded. Probably by the time it goes through the NBC News Channel the data has been removed.

Overall the NameDropper isn’t that smart, it can run crawls for Today, insert logos during primetime, TOTH IDs and I believe can handle EAS alerts. But it’s not a fancy CG.