South West England & CI Thread

Points West have just apologised to Spotlight viewers, and are now carrying some South West news (which is the decent thing to do if you can).

It would see that Points West received less notice about being pan-regional tonight, as compared to the last time they did a joint programme for Spotlight too there was a lot less news for Spotlight, and I don't think there were any reports from Spotlight - they did however try a wider forecast for the combined regions, but didn't have time to update the maps to reflect it, so mentioned the Spotlight areas verbally. The graphics all remained BBC Points West branded too (including the ones captioning news from Plymouth etc).

Spotlight seem to have uploaded all of tonight's reports on Facebook.

Did Plymouth and/or Jersey manage to opt at 7:57?

Sounds like a pretty big issue for them to have problems at 6pm for the headlines and still not be on air at 6.30 and beyond.

Are all the scripts and reports uploaded to a central server where any region could theoretically play them out in any other region if the need arose?

Their Facebook page suggests the problems also prevented them (temporarily) uploading the packages to Facebook. So more than just an opt switch/vision mixing failure.

Spotlight back in SW, but the Channel Islands are still simulcasting with the News Channel.

Strange that they haven't switched Plymouth output into the CI distribution at the Coding and Mux centre rather than leaving the sustaining feed going out.

CI put out a 7 min bulletin on Facebook.

https://www.facebook.com/BBCCINews/videos/vb.192627814096349/1192956904063430/?type=2&theater

More technical issues this morning, with the 6:55am Breakfast bulletin coming from Points West. They did say a welcome to Spotlight viewers, and they've had time to prepare weather maps which include both regions.

Curious that they managed to get on air at 10.25 but can't do Breakfast. Unless it's something that they were able to work around when more staff were available, I guess.

The comment about not being able to upload to Facebook is interesting. My money is on a connectivity failure. If it was the opt switch they could have worked around that via a contribution circuit or even sat truck into Bristol Comms who could have got them on air like when they were camping out in Bristol's DTL studio. If it's the studio or playout system, that wouldn't have stopped the CI opt.

Did Radio Devon have any problems? It looks like the Plymouth studios are now ViLoR so any loss of connectivity would have been "interesting", although it looks like their Exeter studios are still good old Mk3.

Something definitely going wrong, not even capable now of creating a weather forecast. Instead, BBC London's Sara Thornton has uploaded a SW forecast on the Spotlight Facebook page.
https://www.facebook.com/bbcspotlight/videos/vb.150467675018739/988064891259009/?type=2&theater

Spotlight also say that they have had engineers in all overnight to try fix the problem, and still no luck as of yet!

That's a joint forecast for Points West and Spotlight, I suspect Sara was scheduled to cover for Points West (or the hub which covers that area) this morning rather than being anything to do with technical issues at Plymouth.