The Newsroom

Nightshift

Regional newsrooms in the early hours (February 2020)

This site closed in March 2021 and is now a read-only archive
MI
TheMike

Quickly was about 4 years though wasn't it? Sure it changed to ITV News in autumn 2001.

Of course they claimed a slot on DTT wasn't available when it closed but was only a few months later they added a 24 hour stream for ITV Play.


They didn't add a stream for ITV Play, they closed Men and Motors to make way for it, like ITV NC made way for ITV4.

And with National Grid Wireless getting £10million per annum for Freeview slots at the time, participation TV would certainly pay the bills more than any other type of channel. ITV4/ITV NC of course was on ITV's then 48.5% of D3&4, so they didn't have the burden of high fees, however ITV NC did suffer from not having widespread Freeview coverage during 2004-5, because ITV took ages to install new encoders in each region to allow four streams to fit on their side of the multiplex.
MI
TheMike
The ITV News Channel has a routine of constant repeats of news bulletins, especially through the night. Reflecting on the ITV News Channel from their 2004 relaunch, I remember the overnight news consisted of repeats of the News at 10.30 with hourly live news summaries until 5.30am.

I never understood why they repeated the Morning News twice at 6.00 and 6.30 before starting the main news channel schedules at 7.00.

Also in place of the News at 10.30 repeats, they would often simply repeat the midnight news hour through the night until 5.30am, most often at weekends or if there were a news event which happened at 11.00 or so and caused the 10.30 bulletin to be more dated.

Sounds like what most French news channels do nowadays - repeat the late news on a loop during the night.
LO
Londoner

Did they have issues with broadcasting against the GMTV Newshour?

There was a time when the News Channel wasn’t on DTT in the mornings because the airtime on the multiplex belonged to GMTV
JK
JKDerry
I have a typical schedule for a weekday on the news channel back in 2004 and I liked the ITV News Channel, especially in the 2004-2005 look - I would have liked to seen it with the 2006 ITV News backdrop, the atrium view of ITN which I felt would have suited the news channel much more.
BR
Brekkie
Do wonder had the regional structure remained how different regional news might be today. Regions like Central were certainly very proud of their news output and clearly invested in it, refreshing things quite frequently. Back in the 90s if the technology had been available a CBSN style streaming channel for Central News would have seemed quite viable - but nowadays it would be a non-starter unfortunately.

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