Rundown

What is it?

The rundown is the minute-by-minute spreadsheet of a broadcast: every segment in order, each with its start time, duration, who's involved, what plays, and which graphics fire. It is the single most important document in television production — the show's flight plan, shared by everyone in the control room, and the artifact that turns "going live and talking" into a program.

Practical example

A one-hour live show's rundown might read: 00:00 Cold open (2:00) → 02:00 Intro + headlines (3:00) → 05:00 Segment 1: guest interview (18:00, guest: Dr. Rahimi, lower-third ready) → 23:00 Bumper + poll launch (2:00) → 25:00 Segment 2: audience Q&A (15:00) → 40:00 Clip package (4:00) → 44:00 Segment 3: announcement (10:00) → 54:00 Recap + CTA (4:00) → 58:00 Outro (2:00). During the show, everyone — host, producer, graphics — tracks against this sheet; when the interview runs long, the producer is recalculating the rest of the rundown in real time, deciding what shrinks. The discipline is what lets a live hour land on time, every week.

Key things to know (non-technical)

• It's the coordination spine: host pacing, switcher prep, graphics readiness, and guest timing all hang off one shared timeline.
• The columns of a classic rundown: item number, segment name, talent, source (camera/clip/graphic), duration, and running total — simple structure, enormous leverage.
• Live rundowns are living: items get cut, stretched, and reordered mid-show — the skill is managing the document under fire (and back-timing toward the hard out).
• Even a solo creator's bullet list taped to the desk is a rundown — the formalization scales with the show, but the concept starts at episode one.

In Tupic Live

A rundown feature is Tupic Live's deepest "TV station" claim: segments with planned durations, a live clock showing ahead/behind, each segment linked to its scene and graphics so the show's plan and the show's controls are the same surface — the broadcast discipline of a control room, native in the product.