BBC News technical meltdown

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Gosh!

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v300/nok32uk/BBCfail0.jpg

.. from a BBC worker I follow on twitter.

Back to paper and telephones in the studio then

Is 4:30am a good time? I guess there is never a good time when you are running a 24 hour news channel but BBC One goes over to BBC News at 4:25am this morning so they will be getting an increase in viewers just as things might go wrong.

Noggin mentioned IT problems this morning in the BBC London thread, apparently their autocue was not working and they had to read from paper.

At 04:25hrs a tiny increase of a handful of insomniacs I should think. There'll probably be more people at TVC than actually watching !

So is it worth sticking a tape in / PVR ing etc?

Reads to me like it's a 4.30am "deadline" to have everything working again, not when they'll be starting the work. Presumably it's around that time that people start coming in to start preparing for Breakfast, and will be wanting the normal IT / IP delivered facilities in order to actually have a programme to broadcast. Overnight probably isn't too much of a problem, as there's only a few members of staff involved, and only 30 minutes of scripted news to transmit an hour, with no requirement for rapidly changing scripts, external feeds, down-the-line interviews or external reporters. It will only be a problem if there's a major breaking news story, and there's no way of accessing the incoming feeds (but I imagine they could be fed to another BBC centre (Glasgow?) and fed to London when everything is back up).

I'm not sure about the BBC, but I used to work on a major local morning show in the States; most of the news staff there arrived at 1AM, while those specifically assigned to the first hour came in and started preparing rundowns and writing news stories at 10PM the previous evening. Even with a large staff, it takes a long time to get the news part of a morning show ready to air (unless, of course, you're simply recycling the news from the night before).

The situation may be different in the BBC's case, but I suspect it's not drastically different.

In terms of feeds there probably shouldn't be too much of a problem, this sounds like the IT/phone system that's gone wrong rather than any broadcast system such as BNCS, the software that is used to route feeds around. At the BBC just like any broadcaster the IT network and the broadcast computer network are kept separate except where schedules, scripts, run orders etc need to be transferred from one to the other. There have been major problems with the new IP based phone system since it was installed, it's been a bit of a disaster all round it seems

If that's the case then the only thing that would affect feeds is the lack of ability to book lines (the bookings system is on the IT network) without which things are made more difficult but not impossible. I don't see how feeding everything via Glasgow would help, it just makes things more complicated... and if the IT network's down then Glasgow's probably will be too!

whaddaya know... Breakfast has made it on air without incident.

Everything looks normal on World too.

All the usual sound problems on Breakfast, everything seems normal