BBC News strike

If you really want to see how effective the strike will be, listen to Radio 5 Live tonight from midnight, as it will be the most instantly effected. The staff in Birmingham will simply walk away at 12, as will the London staff.

Isn't the countdwon run by computer so it's on time?

Business as usual then?

Yes. Am quite interested to see what they say publicly about it, if anything, in the hours of radio prior to the strike starting. Also interested to see whether anyone reads the news on radio 4 at midnight.

I am not going to get involved in the rather pointless (and dare I say ignorant) speculation about who will break the strike and what colour astons we'll have, but I do genuinely wish the best of luck to those of you reading this who are on picket lines tomorrow. Hopefully someone somewhere will finally realise the depth of feeling and that this *not* the way to go about running a broadcasting organisation. Let's hope you don't have to go through it all again in a week's time.

William

well, for anyone who will be interested, i'm monitoring the strike action to produce reports for my own organisation, so I will be watching BBC News output and monitoring BBC Radio output from midnight, so i'll post any interesting happenings from then.

Yes, presumably with the software they use, ENPS is it?, I presume though managers from five years ago may have not used this though, however I have absolutely no knowledge in this area so could be totally wrong.

It's all fine that software could trigger the top of the hour countdown, but what if it freezes or requires a tweak. We all know that it doesn't cope with TT:00:00:00:00 time stamp and requires tweaking through the night, so how are they going to manage that with the techy's going out at 00:01??

Surely it's run just in the same way as every other piece of video (and remember it is just another piece of video, like a trail) apart from the back-timing it's no diffrent

Columbus runs the countdown automatically at the correct times.

Thanks for that moment of sanity.

While everyone's getting their Kleenex out tomorrow, remember the serious side of what is happening.

Lets hope it doesn't go to a second or third day

Well I've said on record, that I really hope the situation will be solved as soon as they can, because people's livlihoods are at stake here. Any comments made here are just to reflect on TV presentation and nothing else.

I think unfortunately (as much as I don't like strike action, sometimes it is necessary), Mark Thompson isn't going to budge very swiftly on this one, unless he is forced to. I reckon we will see the 48 hour strike, and that will then force him to concede some room.