Bauer rebranding 53 stations to The Hits/Greatest Hits

And yet, in the network studio, the presenter/dj will know instantly if the commercial breaks are failing to go out on any of the stations that should be playing them..

Sorry if its a bit off topic too but I noticed today on Magic Soul this afternoon felt like it crashed out at certain times - was blank for up to a minute then music resumed?

Just to add I noticed on Sunday during UK Top 30 on Tay FM (I know its not local as once was), they ran the bulletin to the end (think it was the weather update sequence) the intro for the chart came crashing in too early (why do that?) (if I have posted this in wrong thread can it be put in correct one?)

The DJ or whoever was in the studio would surely have known that the news wasn't going out. That doesn't necessarily mean they could fix it in that 2 minutes though. They presumably couldn't abandon the bulletin and move on as it would screw up any local news bulletins

Greatest Hits isn't live at that time on Sunday so there would be no one in the studio to correct the fault. The Public File says:

Programming within weekday daytimes is not regularly automated. Our evening and weeknight programming is generally live from our studios in Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham or London. Our overnight programming, Fridays 7pm-1am, Saturdays 7pm-1am and Sundays 1pm-10pm are automated.

https://planetradio.co.uk/greatest-hits/manchester-public-file/

This page is from the Manchester station, but applies to all regions.

Not necessarily. The presenter will be listening to only one of the feeds, so if for example they're listening to the Manchester feed, which is playing the bulletin, they likely won't know the national feed isn't playing it.

I've not stepped in to Castle Quay for a good few years so it may have changed, but last time I was there the local Manchester feed was definitely the default on the monitors.

They do have a screen showing levels from each individual station, but if the bed is playing they will see bouncing levels and might not realise it's not the right thing. I don't know if the software Bauer use is able to indicate the split/opt status (Global's does so it's obvious when a split fails).

If they do realise, they likely won't be able to do anything about it. If it fails to play on all the stations they can quickly skip out the news to the next item on the playlist, but if some of the stations are playing the news you're stuck. You can't manually fire it as all the stations need to play the news and finish the opt at the same time, you can't skip out as the ones that are playing the news will continue playing it over you.

I've heard the same happen on Global's station's in the past, where the news fails to play and a clean bed goes out for a minute. The presenter just has to sit there and wait for clock on the automation to count down.

I mentioned this on DS initially but even when a news bulletin fails to playout (choose your own Bauer "local" of choice) I was told it was more of a playout issue but it seems that the presenter wouldn't know its happened.... still though there is not even an apology given out either when things like that happen (I guess its not to obvious that a networked show is to be local)...

I get that a network presenter wouldn't know if a local bulletin hadn't gone out, but surely they'd know if a networked one had? Or is the output of the networked studio totally clean and everything added downstream?

It's unlikely that there would be an apology for lack of news on any networked programme, some takers might have got news, some might not

The trick would surely be networking the bulletin plus bed so any stations not taking it would get silence - that could be more easily spotted on a visual monitoring solution. This would only work on stations sharing branding/beds though...

Another more technical solution is detecting the speech going out (or lack thereof) - surely with speech recognition solutions available now it would be possible to distinguish music/bed vs speech (especially if the audio bed is 'known').

As mentioned above, for a commercial station, this sort of thing for a 2 min news bulletin is probably not worth it...

Surely, a network of commercial radio stations must have a system that captures all transmission events for commercials. Detecting at as down-stream a point as practicable, so that evidence is available that specific commercials were actually broadcast in specific markets.

If not, then how do they resolve billing disputes?

I can't believe that the only recourse would be to an off-air logging tape/file, even if such a thing were still available?

I'm not sure what happens these days. About a year ago Heart Reigate 102.7 (or whatever it's called) was transmitting digi-crap for well over 24 hours one weekend,

There's growing anger from Spirit FM listeners about the changes coming - already the music has changed substantially and Greatest Hits Radio is featuring in the jingles - is there any chance of Bauer changing their minds?

https://www.facebook.com/groups/571085170455628/about/

The thing is (I don't understand this properly and apologies) but if its a networked show it should be spotted isn't that the whole point of when you keep a "local" brand you are meant to be local as possible without problems/issues (I know I have said networked but when you use a local station taglines but broadcasting elsewhere just makes a mockery of it all)