Stories of ThinkTech

HOSTS CAN PRODUCE SHOWS, TOO ThinkTech wants to connect hosts and guests from around the world, every continent, every country, every city and town.   Since our regular production hours are generally 10:00 am to 4:30 pm Monday to Thursday, if a host wants to do a talk show with someone in a place outside these hours, we need to make special arrangements. There is a solution: hosts can produce shows themselves, too.   They can sign up for the free version of Zoom, which allows them to do a Zoom show up to 40-minutes long.   Using Zoom, they can record that show onto the cloud and send us the link.   We can then edit the resulting footage into a show that can be uploaded and streamed on our playlist. This is something we have covered in our Host Bulletin, so our ThinkTech hosts presumably know about it.   So, if a host wants to do a show outside of our regular broadcast hours, that is entirely possible.   We’ll step the host through the techniques, and we can...

INNOVATIONS ON THE FRONT END AND THE BACK If you hadn't noticed, over the past few months we've made lots of changes and improvements on the front end of what we do, i.e., our talk show videos, our website, our advisories and our social media platforms. And there are also a lot of changes and improvements you don't see, where we are always working to improve our ThinkTech back office. We've added a Playlist Production Monitor to our website, thinktechhawaii.com , so you can see the streaming status of our playlist at any given moment. We've also updated the synchronization of the calendar listings on our website to be better synched to our new Google Airdate Schedule calendar. This should help you find our videos when they are first aired. And we've added a splash screen when you visit the website so you can subscribe as a friend, if you haven't already done so. We've also been working on our newsletters and advisories.  We've added a Movie of th...

THINKTECH EVERYWHERE Reminder that ThinkTech not only offers its stream and on demand content on its website  thinktechhawaii.com , youtube.com/thinktechhawaii , vimeo.com/thinktechhawaii , and an increasing number of other platforms, including F acebook , Twitter , Instagram , LinkedIn and Apple Music . ThinkTech also broadcasts on Olelo 54 Community Media in Honolulu, where you can watch our most popular talk shows, and on Samsung Smart TV, where you can tune into thinktechhawaii.com and youtube.com/thinktechhawaii all through the day or night. There's more, too.  We offer our stream through our ThinkTech smartphone apps on both iPhone and Android .  You can catch our stream by downloading those apps from the App Store app on iPhone and the Google Play Store app on Android, and watch us wherever you go in the world. When you put it all together, ThinkTech is becoming ubiquitous.  You  can see what we're covering and enjoy our talk shows and entr'acte conten...

  GOOD CITIZENS NEED TO BE INFORMED This week American Issues Take One host Tim Apicella asked Vicky Cayetano to join that talk show.  The show was about national issues that may affect Hawaii, and what our gubernatorial candidates felt about those issues and what, if anything, they might do in office to deal with those issues. There were several such issues discussed on the show.  Vicky Cayetano was up on all the national issues covered and was knowledgeable, thoughtful and responsive to the questions posted to her.  It turned out to be an important discussion and a good showcase for this particular candidate. In these difficult times, where our country is so incredibly and destructively divided on so many things and where our federal government is dysfunctional in so many ways, Hawaii cannot be oblivious to national news and events.  These things do affect Hawaii, or will soon, and our state and local governments must factor in developments on the mainland, an...

MOVING UP ON OUR ENTR’ACTE Have you checked out our entr’acte?   We broadcast our entr’acte between the talk shows we stream on our Live to Playlist system, and it is on a special LTP playlist that plays through every day and night. Wondering what an entr’acte is?  It’s French, Entr'acte  (or  entracte , or German:  Zwischenspiel  or  Zwischenakt , or Italian:  intermezzo , or Spanish:  intermedio, intervalo or sainete ) means "between the acts". A pause between two parts of a production, synonymous to an  intermission , and often includes music performed between the acts of a production to bridge the dramatic action and make a transition from one act to the next. For ThinkTech, the entr’acte fills the gap between talk shows and it can therefore be up to 30 minutes long.   It includes public service announcements, commentaries, break music and a potpourri of selected clips. If you have any ideas for commentaries or or othe...

LTP GIVES US NEW POSSIBILITIES      As you know from previous blog postings, ThinkTech has deployed its new Live to Playlist system to achieve higher production values, more punctual start times, and to provide hosts and guests the chance to see and learn from watching their talk shows on the airdate after their production date. Shows produced on Mondays are aired on Tuesdays and so on through the week.  But there's something else.  LTP gives us the opportunity to populate our Sunday and Monday Playlists with special focused collections of videos, and we intend to do just that. The first thought was to air our weekly Top Five and Staff Pick shows, which are selected on Sundays, on the LTP playlist for Monday.  That way, our Top Five and Staff Pick winners and our viewership in general can see and celebrate the Top Five and Staff Pick shows through the broadcast day on Mondays.   But a Sunday Playlist offers new opportunities, too. There are many g...

SOFTWARE FOR THE LIVE TO PLAYLIST TRANSITION We've been working on the Filemaker Claris software routines and scripts that will allow Hayley, our Production Manager, to automatically post and schedule our talk show events not only on our Google Production Calendar, as has been the case in the past, but also to our new LTP Google Airdate Calendar. As we described in our Special Bulletin on the subject, the air dates will now presumptively be on the next day after the production dates; for example, if the show is produced on a Monday, the air date will be the Tuesday immediately following, at the same time.  With the help of our coding expert, we've been able to write the routines necessary to handle these changes, and our LTP system is ready for primetime.   The email messages to hosts and guests will go out, as before, asking them for the show information about their shows, advising them of the production details and dates for their shows, and sending them the Zoom links ...