Dirty Feed

What is it?

The dirty feed is the program output with everything on it: the show as the audience sees it — graphics, lower-thirds, logos, tickers, alerts, all burned in. "Dirty" carries no judgment; it's the pairing term to clean: the dressed broadcast versus the undressed one. The dirty feed is the final product; the clean feed is the master kept flexible.

Practical example

What transmits to homes is by definition the dirty feed — scoreboard, sponsor bug, captions and all. The pair travels together professionally: the production truck outputs dirty (to air) and clean (to partners/archive) simultaneously, and "are you taking clean or dirty?" is a routine question when feeds are handed between organizations. The everyday streaming case: the recording of a broadcast as it streamed — alerts, chat overlay, the works — is a dirty recording; perfect as the faithful VOD of what the audience experienced, limiting as material for re-editing (last Tuesday's donation alert is now permanently mid-frame in the clip).

Key things to know (non-technical)

• The decision rule between the pair: dirty for faithfulness, clean for flexibility — the dirty feed documents the broadcast as experienced; the clean feed preserves the ability to redress it.
• Dirty is the default everywhere: what airs, what records by default, what the VOD shows — clean is the deliberate extra tap.
• The archive wisdom: keep both when storage allows — the dirty feed answers "what did the audience see?", the clean feed answers "what can we make from this?"
• The terminology earns its keep at handoffs: between studios, partners, and tools, clean/dirty is the two-word contract about graphics.

In Tupic Live

The dirty feed is Tupic Live's default everything — the broadcast, the recording, the VOD — and rightly so; the product decision is simply offering its twin: a "record clean copy too" toggle for shows that will be re-cut, with the platform's clip and VOD tooling smart about which master to pull from for which job.