Only 7 hours 45 mins a weekday on the News Channel is live and unique to the channel these days, the rest being simulcast with BBC One, BBC Two or BBC World, pre-recorded back half hours and the Newsnight repeat.
Just fortunate they dropped the '24' when they did.
Hmmm I don’t know.... I think BBC News 7¾ has a ring to it!
I think I mentioned this before but why was there the need for the countdown. Someone said it was for continuity as there wasn’t any handoff from one show to the other. My question is why couldn’t they just run the regular trails they do near the TOTH and start with the show open? That question being asked I will say I enjoy them and can’t imagine the channel with out them.
The countdown filler came about as a way of buffering up to the exact top of the hour. With no adverts, regions or affiliates, or even an MCR type Presentation department involved in the transmission of News 24/Channel, it’s always meant that programme timings aren’t that critical. However the top of the hour is almost always hit to the second and so the flags and then countdowns were conceived as a way of running some channel promotion which could be joined as required already running up to the top of the hour.
The countdown filler came about as a way of buffering up to the exact top of the hour. With no adverts, regions or affiliates, or even an MCR type Presentation department involved in the transmission of News 24/Channel, it’s always meant that programme timings aren’t that critical. However the top of the hour is almost always hit to the second and so the flags and then countdowns were conceived as a way of running some channel promotion which could be joined as required already running up to the top of the hour.
Okay. Sounds like it was just so you didn’t have to cut content or find trails for upcoming programs to fit the exact time to the top of the hour.
Also don't forget in the early years and in the early part of the 2003 rebrand, there were full blown programme menus on the countdown as well, so it served that purpose as well... especially in the flags era, think of them not as countdowns, but more as dynamic moving menu slides attached to idents. In this way they were not much different to other pres aspects of the era, when programme menus were very much still a thing, albeit getting rarer and rarer.
One thing I do recall about BBC News 24 was the first time we got a surround sound system in, the first thing I told my parents to test it with was N24's thunderclaps. Of course I didn't know back then it wasn't being transmitted in 5.1 but it sounded damn good when all we had had before was one piddly mono speaker on the side of an old CRT..
The countdown filler came about as a way of buffering up to the exact top of the hour. With no adverts, regions or affiliates, or even an MCR type Presentation department involved in the transmission of News 24/Channel, it’s always meant that programme timings aren’t that critical. However the top of the hour is almost always hit to the second and so the flags and then countdowns were conceived as a way of running some channel promotion which could be joined as required already running up to the top of the hour.
Okay. Sounds like it was just so you didn’t have to cut content or find trails for upcoming programs to fit the exact time to the top of the hour.
There have always been (and still are) some trails on News 24/Channel, generally a couple at the top and bottom of hours. But they tend to be 30" long, so filling an awkward gap like 54" was always going to be a problem.
The countdown filler came about as a way of buffering up to the exact top of the hour. With no adverts, regions or affiliates, or even an MCR type Presentation department involved in the transmission of News 24/Channel, it’s always meant that programme timings aren’t that critical. However the top of the hour is almost always hit to the second and so the flags and then countdowns were conceived as a way of running some channel promotion which could be joined as required already running up to the top of the hour.
Okay. Sounds like it was just so you didn’t have to cut content or find trails for upcoming programs to fit the exact time to the top of the hour.
Yes and no. News 24 has no separate Playout operation, and works very similarly to BBC Radio 5 Live. The use of a pre-fade to get you to the top of the hour is a well known and well used TV and Radio technique (they are also used to get regular shows to an off-air time accurately) The countdown is just a very nicely designed example of a pre-fade.
The News 24 gallery operation could add and drop promos to get approximately to the top of the hour - but would never hit 'second accurate' without the prefade, as the promos were almost always 30" long - with no more granularity to play with than that (there were some exceptions to the 30" rule). It was always a rule on News 24 that you hit the top of the hour to the second - just like some radio channels hit the pips.
The holy grail was always to catch the full 90 second countdown - which you were more likely to see on BBC1 at the crossover point to News 24. Despite numerous attempts, however, the most I ever got was 89 seconds!
On the first day of the October 1999 revamp, the 10pm countdown was started a minute late, and so about 70 seconds was shown rather than 10 seconds as it should have been, and the headlines started at 10.01.
When the countdown changed to shots of everyday life in January 2003, rather than being purely graphical, it lost some appeal to me, in much the way that I prefer graphical idents over those that feature real life footage.