Is the cue-dot returning?

Not sure if it's still the case, but the first series of I'm a Celebrity Get me Out of Here had 2 cue dots - one for the OB counting down to the sponsorship sting and the next counting out of the sponsirship sting and into the break

Even if "Twian" was shot on film TV rarely ran telecine live. it would be transferred onto tape - hence the cue dots appearance.
yes film had two cue circles. I can't remember the seperation but the 2nd cue was 6 seconds before the next reel start.

Didn't really realise they'd gone away - they've been on alot of programming in the last few years!

Can anyone shed any light on the constantly changing speed of rotation that many cue dots exhibit? The fully vertical ones do this to some degree but not by much, but the 'trellis'-like cue-dots do this even more. It's as if some sort of digital data is being encoded into the dot - perhaps like a professional equivalent of RDS for identifying the feed - is this the case?

The DVDs of Mr Bean are the cut versions that went out on telly (so have cut dots burnt in) first time round and so have bits missing compared to the original video releases which only have cue-dots over the credits as it was the only place you could guarantee to put one

As for break structure, its changed a lot since the majority of the programming aired on ITV3 was first made. Now they cram an average of 12mins an hour of ads in, it only ever used to be about eight or nine. As ITV as a whole (not just ITV3) has decided it wants to split hour long programmes into blocks of five (if Thursday night's airing of The Two Ronnies on ITV3 was anything to go by), the original break junctions have become irrevelant.

May well be wrong on this but I think it's just so it's more noticeable, and I think I read something to do with it being non-sync.

Often wondered the same thing myself.

And, why was it that ITV regions all had totally different cue dots? Anglia and TVS had a BBC-style two-line dot, whereas Central's was a massive affair, Thames and Granada had ones as mentioned above, TTTV's was similar but smaller and moved at a constant rate. I can understand they all had different technology, but was there a specific reason for the variation?

I recall you could always tell when Granada's Night Time had taken over continuity late-night because the Granada dot would appear mid-way through a film, where it had been absent before, often overlaid over the existing one (usually London-sourced).

I'm quite possibly rather sad for remembering all this...

Nothing that clever I'm afraid... AIUI the strobing changing speed is purely because the cue-dots aren't field and line locked and instead are free-running, and therefore animate and strobe. The BBC versions were locked, and thus appeared static...

The strobing was designed to make them more visible.