BBC Breakfast

The animated waveform is new but stock images of a tape (particularly a micro cassette in an answering machine) have been common for a long time.

I know part of the issue is not wanting a static image for too long, but it's not difficult to drop a photograph on top of the generic BBC News animation, or do a Ken Burns style slow zoom, surely?

Yes, but why ? Are they worried the transmitters might stall ? (because they won't !) I've got no problem with a gently moving background, like they have behind the footie results, (although again, I don't recall rioting in the streets when these were static letraset captions)

I seem to recall Tony Currie saying that a still image for too long sets off alarms at BBC Scotland, although others who would be in the know expressed surprise at that suggestion.

But I guess it's just the convention now to keep the pictures moving.

For goodness sake, we're not talking about hours and hours worth of stationary image, 20-30 secs, that's all it is.
If we can't have a modern broadcast infrastructure that can't cope with that (when it could 30 years ago !) there's frankly no bloody hope !

However I bet it's got nothing to do with technical concerns; it's the modern production mind set of make sure the zero attention span numpties don't switch off/over.

I'm not disagreeing with you, but that's how meeja types think these days!

The video freeze alarms have nothing to do with any tech not being able to cope with a still image, they're there because a still image is often a pretty good sign that something's gone wrong somewhere. They're absolutely standard across the board in TX, both in playout and distribution, along with silence alarms. All that tends to vary from place to place is how many seconds trigger the alarm.

That of course doesn't mean that still images aren't allowed to air and I'm sure that in this case it's more about having something visually interesting for viewers at home.

Yes in fact MPEG encoders will find a still image easier to process!

I'm not sure the moving slide thing is done purely for the benefit of those monitoring the TX chain bit it will help them out by not having fault alarms crying wolf every half hour. Alarms like that are usually set differently for different services. I'd have thought the freeze and silent alarms for the News Channel will be set longer than, say BBC1 like Radio 3's will be longer than Radio 1's

I'm not sure what happens with the overnight slides on 4 and CBBC, presumably they just disable the alarm until audio resumes, those sort of predictable 'faults' can be easily dealt with than a news package

Aren't both of those slides animated?

I did notice at 22:30 last night, 30 seconds worth of the lottery results caption on BBC1, totally static. Just saying.

Visually interesting, well Ok, let’s say yes, but distracting and/or trivialising the audio content ( as was the case I posted about) No. By the way, I think there was movement in the picture anyway, a slow zoom into a photo, which was perfectly acceptable on its own

No - they had the usual animated grey circles in the background (at least on BBC One England HD).

I must have been totally captivated by the audio content in that case !