The new NEW Central West and BBC Midlands thread

On Facebook, the 'BBC Midlands Today' page is now 'BBC Midlands'

Hopefully that notion and that name stays on Facebook, and isn't ported onto the programme itself.

EDIT: the endcap on the 1325 bulletin has the old URL on it

North West Tonight's Facebook page changed to BBC NW fairly recently with a similar-looking logo.

I guess the idea is so that the one page also suffices for Inside Out, the Politics Show opt and any regional specials rather than having multiple pages posting the same content or sharing each other's stuff.

I often find it mildly irritating on Twitter when the same post goes out simultaneously from Look North and Radio Leeds. This may be an effort to avoid the same issue.

So viewers in the West Midlands teamed up with Northern Ireland tonight to simulcast a 'BBC News NI Special' about the IRA and the Birmingham Pub Bombings.

Therefore the Midlands are following the same delayed schedule as Northern Ireland viewers are. However they are merely delaying output from Network by half an hour.

On the BBC News at 10, they only mentioned it being on BBC NI and the News Channel unless I misheard

The CA on BBC One Midlands after the late news did say it was a change to the advertised schedule. How they are doing the 30 minute delayed feed of BBC One network? A bit weird that they've not just dropped the repeat after the news as then they'd be back on schedule with network, rather than have to timeshift the rest of the night's programming - this would have meant trying to meet the start of the 11:15 programme on network, which I presume could have been done with a couple of promos and a long ident if they were behind, where as now does this means someone has to be in a gallery in Birmingham to switch over to the News Channel at some point, unless they plan on showing that on a delay as well?!

Pretty much - there's next to no automation for opting at Birmingham (unless things have changed in the last 5 years when I was last there). They can't delay the NC as it's live news, unless they aston it up as Recorded/Delayed

Unfortunately nothing special for the throw to the NC - at the end of Who do you think you are? they crashed into a weather forecast on the NC that was already halfway through, whilst we also had a few seconds of audio from the trailer that presumably network had shown after WDYTYA half an hour previously. No Weather for the Week ahead.

Except all the automation in the gallery!


I did one of these timeshifts years ago in a news gallery, it was just a point of recording the network, clipping up the bits we needed and putting them into the gallery automation and then play them from the server. After all that's essentially what playout is doing - playing server clips one after the other. We could remove trails (or add our own!) as we wanted as long as we hit the end of it on time.

In our case we had some of the programmes sent over in advance which wouldn't be the case here as it was short notice.

In this case they probably just hit record on a server and then play it back after the local programme, the same as a +1 channel works.

Although in this case the other option would have been to take Northern Ireland's timeshift, assuming they were prepared to debrand their output for a few hours


(having said all that it is a little bit more complicated than playing clips, we had issues with subtitles, though this was in the analogue days so it might well be something that's been sorted now)

I was referring to the actual opting back to Network, which as far as I knew had to be done manually (sure it's a key switch) - the actual running of programmes and segments of course could be run through the news gallery automation

Ah I see, though why would they need that? The only reason would be to have it unattended, and someone needs to be there to babysit the opt out anyway