Channel 4 pre-1993 regional opt outs

I must admit I thought that myself, but then why would the cue dot be there. As you say the TVT promos weren't ads (although they were commonly tagged at the end of breaks as if it was one).

Well, the cue dot was still there as a signal to those ITV companies who were going to opt out fully for the break, and therefore not show the promo.

True but there wasn't much of a gap between the C4 promo and the TVT one; I wouldn't have thought C4 would have gone in for dirty feeds. There was usually a 2-second black handover before the holding slide came up as I recall.

It is short, but no worse than a modern day opt out point pause, buttons are still buttons !

Looking at it again there was quite a long freeze at the end of the C4 promo so I guess they could have used that in lieu of a black space.

They may well have mentioned that on the Ident system. Of course any company using the automated triggers would have been fine anyway

All promos and ads had a 10 second freeze/holder on their ends so nothing exceptional there.it was very standard practice where I worked to fill any unsold C4 ad time with COI’s and TVT promos, generally everything was sold up to up but not always including the last break of the day.

As an aside, is there a list or source of the music used in the TVT ads as the years rolled by?

Edited to add, was the TVT still regionalised at that point? If so those interested might be able to zoom in on the end pack shot and determine which region? Just a thought.

H


Very very unlikely to have come from C4, never saw it in all my years in the local C4 tx suite - always a clean sustaining feed.

True but there's a difference between having a 10 second freeze on the tape, and broadcasting that freeze for a second or two (not that that was especially unusual in the 1980s either).



Yeah, to be honest I don't recall any break on C4 being short-filled on any of the areas I was capable of receiving (TT/YTV/Central/Anglia/Granada, although I didn't make a habit of watching other areas' ad-breaks at the time!) after around 1984. And thinking about it, I don't recall TVT promos being broadcast on C4 very much in the North East -- they seemed to fill the ends of breaks up with those slide-based local ads when they were short -- selling them at a cut-rate to fill the breaks up?

Broadcasting the freeze on the end of the last comm in the break was incredibly common, in fact advertisers often wanted to be the last comm in the break precisely for that reason. Remember the duration of the comms break was longer than the total sum of all the individual comms plus all the black in between and any opticals - for flexibility, it often meant there was a second or so ‘spare’ at the end of a comms break and so the freeze was put out. For example, 2 by30 second comms plus an optical at front plus black inbewteen the two ads would be scheduled to be 1.05 in actuality - more than enough, way more than enough.

Helped me when I was recording a show. The freeze frame meant I had to press the record button (ahh memories of VHS and assemble editing)

I think I've mentioned before that YTV broke that principle a lot (especially during daytime) where between programmes they'd load the promos (pre- and post-break), the ads themselves and the animated ident (sometimes with a pre-recorded "next" sequence as well with live v/o), with no long pause after the adverts, all into the cart system as a continuous stream. This meant they sometimes had a longer period on the ident than expected, and the announcer would just read their script and not pad out, so you'd sometimes see 3 or 4 seconds of the logo spinning away after the programme was announced, dead space and all.