Milwaukee City Channel invests in automated bi-lingual captioning equipment

The Milwaukee City Channel recently added 24-hour, bilingual, automated captioning to all broadcasts with an ACE 2200 Closed Captioning Engine.

A one-time purchase with no annual, recurring fees allows us to broadcast 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for all production coming out of our studios. This includes all live meeting coverage, live press conferences and events, as well as post production edit projects. Anything not broadcast on our regular City Channel air feed gets re-encoded through the system and post captioned in a matter of minutes.

For bilingual viewers, the Spanish language is available on the CC3 closed captioning channel.

Making the switch from human captioning to an automated system was an outstanding investment for us. This completely eliminated annual costs, errors and corrections, captioning requests when broadcasts were missed or not captioned at all. Integrating it into our master control system was a smooth transition and it has been running seamlessly since.

Glad to have it!

— Paul Karczewski
Manager, Milwaukee City Channel

Buttke honored with the Assembly's Hometown Hero Award

Sharing this important day with Tom (center) are (left to right): Speaker of the Assembly Robin Vos; David Ballerstein; his wife, Terri Buttke; Rep. John Spiros; and his sister, Renie Rehmer.

Wisconsin Community Media congratulates Tom Buttke, a community television producer from Marshfield, who was honored with the Hometown Hero Award at the Wisconsin State Capitol on April 25.   

Buttke served on the Marshfield City Council for 22 years and has always been active in the community.  “Tom has done many things from helping kids, to raising money for projects at the Marshfield Zoo,” said David Ballerstein, Communications Specialist at Marshfield Broadcasting.  Buttke was one of the leaders of a fundraising effort to create a veterans wall of honor at the Second Street Community Center.

Buttke also produces and hosts the community program, Heroes from Home, which is shot in the Marshfield Broadcasting studio.  Veterans who come on the show talk about their experiences and share what services are available for vets and how to apply for them.

The Wisconsin State Assembly established the Hometown Heroes program to recognize people who “make a difference in their community.” The award says, “A Hometown Hero has an unconditional desire to lend a helping hand to those around them.”

Congratulations, Tom! Well-deserved!

Monona Community Media upgrades will wow viewers and expand its reach

Members of the Monona Grove AV Club give the thumbs up to the “cool upgrades” at Monona Community Media.

The City of Monona’s Community Media Department has been working on some “cool upgrades” this year!

In early March, Daniell Krawczyk and his team from Municipal Captioning installed a new Cablecast VIO 2 OMNI playback video server that has smart phone mobile app capabilities. The new Monona Community Media mobile app will look and work much like YouTube, but without all the clutter of YouTube.   “The app will make it so much easier for people to watch Monona programming anywhere, anytime,” said Will Nimmow, Director of Monona Community Media. 

Because of this new equipment, Monona Community Media can now offer its TDS cable channel – channel 26 -- in HD (and Charter Spectrum could, too, if the company was interested). “In what I suppose is typical for a partnership between a cable provider and municipality, the process has been moving slowly,” said Nimmow, “but TDS has installed their equipment and cabling and the next step is working with them to get the encoder ordered and connected to the system.

Staff at Monona Community Media and the many students involved through the Monona Grove AV Club are practicing patience as they excitedly await the next steps. But as he waits, Nimmow hasn’t been twiddling his thumbs.  He’s been planning the roll out of a strong promotional blitz with the Monona Community Media Committee.  “We want all Monona residents to know how easily they can be connected to Monona Community Media radio and video programming.”

Even though this upgrade project was expensive, the city decided it was a necessary step to keep up with the communication needs of its residents.  For the first time ever, the Monona City Council approved a capital purchase for the station as part of its 2023 capital expense budget. Normally such a purchase would have been paid with revenue from Video Service Provider fees, but revenue from these fees has been declining as the number of people subscribing to cable television declines.

Nimmow is very proud of the Monona City Council for taking such supportive stance, especially during such a challenging time for the city budget.  "It seems they truly value what we do, so now the pressure is on us to continue our service level," he said.