The Sport Thread

1528 is a BBC Northern Ireland SNG truck

That happens now, with many of the TMS team (who are not BBC staff) also doing stints on Sky's coverage.

It would be nice to have a red button option for the TMS comms as they often do for football.

Only if it is attached to the HD feed and doesn't mean switching to SD.

They could legitimately put it on the Audio Description stream.

Rights ...

Channel Four to cover

Breaking news: We're working with Channel 4 to produce the 2019 World Chase Tag Championships @worldchasetag to be shown on British terrestrial television for 1st time on 18th Sept. The event takes place @YorkHallEvents in Bethnal Green tomorrow, 24th August - free entry. 4:30pm pic.twitter.com/znZCLxXyc7

— Sunset+Vine (@sunsetandvine) August 23, 2019

The World Chase Tag championship.

(Well I never knew such an event existed, published for the benefit of other similarly ignorant people)

Well not really. There’s very little overlap between TMS and Sky - only Isa Guha does both. The overseas commentators may overlap, but in recent years there has been far more overlap between TMS and the Sunset and Vine commentary for the C5 highlights.

Incidentally, reading the tender document for the BBC’s highlights, they are looking for a few changes from the current C5 highlights package - more analytically-driven and with more of an emphasis on comment and social media/interactivity. It also won’t be produced on-site (unlike the current S&V production) - largely, it seems, so that regional production quota can be filled with the programme being produced from BBC Sport in Salford.

Looking at the tender requirements, I’m not sure if any indie other than Sunset and Vine even *qualify* to enter the tender (apart from Sky themselves) as I’m pretty sure they are the only indie to have been producing cricket programmes of the volume specified in the ‘requirements to tender’ section.

It will be interesting to see how it all works out. I’ve said for a long time that we won’t know how good the C5 highlights have been until they’ve gone, but I hope that the BBC will give us good coverage.

Sounds like a sport for ESPN 8: The Ocho.

I beg to differ, but... in the last 12months there has been a far more extensive crossover between TMS and Sky. It’s but just Isa Guga. There’s Charles Dagnall, Ebony Rainford-Brent, Graeme Swann, Michael Vaughan, Alison Mitchell and Charlotte Edwards.

I was in York Hall yesterday and saw them setting up something that didn't quite look like a boxing ring, so thank you for solving that mystery!

I was thinking of the men’s international coverage, but I’ll give you Charles Dagnall, who is indeed a regular on the Sky county coverage.

I’m afraid I can’t recall Swann doing any Sky work (he has done occasional world feed stuff in Sri Lanka which may have been broadcast by Sky in the UK) nor Vaughan (who used to do T20 Blast but hasn’t since he signed for BT in 2016). Brent, Mitchell and Edwards only do women’s cricket for Sky AFAIK.

But the men’s international Sky team (Gower, Botham, Lloyd, Holding, Atherton, Hussain, Warne, Sangakkara etc) does not overlap with TMS. Indeed, I was just thinking the other day how unusual it was that Guha does still do ‘frontline’ TMS and Sky work.

The International Rugby highlights on BBC Two have the Sky Sports feed with BBC Sport name tags for their lower thirds.

I believe that’s how it always is.