The Sport Thread

Isnt IMG using their studios for PLTV and their sports channel Sport 24, I've never seen the latter other then promotional material so I have no idea if its using studio facilities.

IMG Sport's graphics for the Premier League are an improvement, not sure about their titles though, I didn't see the full version but it resolves into a matchday ticket.

Saturday Night Football titles from Sky are nice, but its wrapped in awful music, their graphics seem to be more shinier this year and they got rid of the gold shine on it which annoyed me a bit, not sure about the audience format though, it really looks like a glorified basement.

It really is stunning in it's ugliness. I have to say for such a well run and profitable company Sky Sports really have some ugly sets. The new SNF studio is particularly bad imo.

As for Saturday Sportsday - well it's not in the schedules next week due to F1, and the provisionals for the following week put Focus back at 12.15pm with Insire at 1pm.

New teamsheat graphics on MOTD with pictures of the players, including subs.

Interesting piece about how the C5 cricket highlights were put together on Monday night while the Test was continuing as the programme went to air.

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2013/aug/17/england-ashes-channel-five-highlights

Doesn't explain the mic flag though!

Curious that they're still using tapes - unless they're just using 'tape' as shorthand for 'EVS playlist'.

NBC appear to be using some rather incompetent geoblocking on some of their videos, which means the entire Swansea v Man U game is available to watch online.
Here's some screencaps of some graphics:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v214/nonstick/nbcpl4_zpsa27a334f.png

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v214/nonstick/nbcpl3_zps488b223b.png

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v214/nonstick/nbcpl2_zps2ad7e8e6.png
The sponsor logos are on for a fair chunk of the time, and each one is probably there for a minute at a time.

Very interesting - many thanks for the link.

I also thought that it was a contractual requirement for them to be off-air by 8pm, when the Sky highlights begin. But obviously, the ECB would use common-sense so I doubt it would have been a problem had they taken the two extra minutes at the top of the hour to finish the show.

A couple of other notable occurrences of this nature for Channel 5's cricket highlights show (odd to think that they've been showing cricket for longer than Channel 4 did, now!) were 2006 (their first season), when the Oval test match descended into farce over Pakistani ball-tampering allegations. At the end of the programme, when meetings between the teams and officials were going on long into the night, they actually cut out (very clumsily ISTR) from Mark Nicholas' pre-recorded closing to a live feed of Mark, who solemnly announced that he had no new news to report!! Also, in the 2009 Ashes, when the first test match went down to the wire, they clearly thought that it was going to finish once Collingwood had been dismissed, so there was very little time left to show the dramatic conclusion. In the end, they finished the show with the very last ball with no time for any interviews or a closing montage - just Mark Nicholas' excitable commentary. Just shows the perils of editing throughout the day, when you have no idea what the story is going to be at the end of it. And S+V do an excellent job of telling the correct story, somehow!

I couldn't read the names of these on a smaller set! They were way too close to the bottom of the screen.

Sky's new graphics are quite nice - obviously an evolution of the previous set rather than a total revamp, but the new font and animations give them a fresh look.

Setanta's graphics are...the exact same as they have been for years (since 2007 I think?) . The "big screen" intro was dispensed with in favour of something more conventional in early 2012, but the music is still the same theme they have been using all these years (and we'd miss it if they dropped it at this stage!).

They've also got Jake Humphrey to do their own version of the BT Sport advert too.

Not entirely sure the new BBC Sport football graphics being used are 16:9 graphics safe (ignoring 14:9/4:3 safe). It's amazing how many people think overscan disappeared with CRT sets - whereas in most cases it's still present on every flatscreen (and has to be manually reduced or disabled - and in some cases can't be)

A good few of the faces didn't actually match the names.