Starting the Lexington TV station tour with ABC 36 (WTVQ-TV)
- Carey Higgins-Dobney
- Jun 25, 2023
- 2 min read
New town, new tv stations to visit! I started my tour with WTVQ ABC36 in Lexington.
Lots of grass and fences here in Lexington, even around the stations!
WTVQ is the ABC affiliate owned by Morris Multimedia, which is a regional privately-owned company. According to Nielsen, Lexington is the 63rd largest television market in the U.S., making it a medium market on par with Fort Myers, Fresno, Spokane and Honolulu. There are 210 tv markets over all in the country, with size based (more or less) on population (designated as "households" for marketing purposes).The "top 25" are the largest markets. Smaller markets are those numbered below 100. The largest market is New York City, with 7.7 million tv homes. The smallest is Glendive, Montana with fewer than 4,000 tv homes. Lexington has about 511,000 tv homes.
ABC36 has a good-sized studio with multiple sets on wheels. Rolling set pieces in and out of the studio is how many stations make full use of limited space while putting on a wide variety of productions. Given how often some of us move furniture around at home, a couch on wheels wouldn't be a bad idea! Click the arrow on the pics to advance.
On the production side, ABC36 does a full crew production including a director/td, an audio op, a graphics & video op, multiple camera operators and a prompter op. This is also how we teach it at UK. It's a process that will set up our students for professional success working for either manual or automated production studios (click here for a post on what this means).
This is a wide view of much of the control room. In the foreground is the video switcher for the director/td. Graphics and video are to the left. Producer sits to the right. Audio has its own room behind where I took the picture. The monitors show what is on the air and what sources look like before they hit the air.
I love colorful switchers. :) Grass Valley's color pallets have come a long way from the traditional orange, white and yellow of the analog days! This is a 2 ME switcher, with program/preview functioning as another bank. This is how all of the video we see on television is put on the air. The td (technical director) is essentially a live video editor, adding effects, graphics, video and cameras to the mix. There are no second takes or do-overs in live tv!
Audio lives in its own room, which many ops like! This board is a Wheatstone, which is a very popular audio brand. I try to swing by their display at NAB each year.
Finally, it wouldn't be tv station without the random bucket o dead batteries! This is a staple in almost every station I've ever been in.
Thank you to WTVQ for letting me poke around for a bit! This was my surprise as I left the station: horses! While not the station's horses, they seem to be fairly pleasant neighbors!
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