Sky News: Presentation Discussion

Because Visions, as one of the largest OB facility providers in the country, have a significant quantity of HD equipment, and engineering crews used to working with the equipment.

Visions won't be producing the coverage though (they're only a facilities company, not a production company), but whoever is (and booked them for the job) will have requested it to be in HD rather than SD (and paid for it to be that way). Visions do have a long record of providing HD facilities to Sky, being one of the original (possibly first?) OB provider for Sky Sports HD when it launched.

derek - Sky have virtually no HD facilities of their own outside of their permenant studios. Everything is hired in from other companies as and when they need it (although there are permenant arrangements with companies like SIS to provide access to uplink vehicles and satellite capacity).

I realise that. It was the 'nothing to do with Sky' bit. Surely it's Sky who are paying for it to be in HD.

The comparison was actually supposed to tie-in with the previous comment about personal insults.

All I was saying, was from what I've seen, and with the rise of the 'Sack Burley/Boulton' online groups, a lot of people just appear to be jumping on the bandwagon, rather than genuine complaints from the actual Live TV event.

"From what [you] have seen"? Are you peering in the windows of all 900 complainants?

Let me ask you this - what was your take on the behaviour of Burley and Boulton in the cases referred to?

Not necceseraly. With pooled footage, it will have been up to whoever booked the facilities, be that Sky, BBC, ITN, Reuters, Downing Street Press Office. The individual broadcasters wanting access to those pictures may have requested it to have been in HD (I would imagine that BBC as well as Sky would want it in HD if available). With events like this where lots of people will definately all want pictures, almost certainly all the broadcasters will be paying for it.

The nothing to do with Sky bit could refer to the fact that Sky have nothing to do with the picture quality coming from Downing Street, other than a request for it to be in HD. It will be Visions staff / freelancers working for Visions who are responsible for the quality of the pictures.

Like I said, a lot of what I've seen... of course I'm not talking for everyone.
I was speculating on the origin of some of the large number of complaints, based on what I'd seen... (particularly groups which say in the title 'invite as many friends as you can'.)

I think what Burley did was an error of judgement, but not a sackable offence.
With Boulton, again a mistake in hindsight.

There are hundreds of complaints on the Guardian blogs. Are you saying that all those Guardian readers were watching Sky News off air? I don't think so. There are still people on there today posting the link to Ofcom to get some more.

I'll ask you the same thing then - what did you think of their actions on camera?

Its one thing to rubbish facebook groups like Jan Moir did (calling it "mischief making); but I'd like to know if you're actually defending what you saw.

IMHO the problem with Boulton was not his - it was Sky not having a large enough and credible enough political team that he had to personally carry their entire elections coverage. For 2015, they need to have someone who can equal Boulton, so they can share the 20 hour days between them.

Neither of them have done anything sackable in this case, but if Sky want a credible news operation, their senior political editor can not just explode as a result of some prodding by a notorious spin doctor, who's job was to take the publics eyes away from things the government didn't want analysed, and give them something else to concentrate on instead. In this case, Cambell did excellently. Nobody remembers him trying to deny Labour had lost, just that Boulton had exploded with rage.

Yes but it's unusual for Boulton to explode like that. Burley is consistently useless: "eastern seaboard of the United States has been decimated" etc.

On a related note, anyone else remember a site from back in the forum's youth, possibly 2002 - 2003 called "Young Journalists.com" It was pink and had several interviews with big name people, Huw Edwards etc, to inspire kids to be yournalists.

Burley's interview came over as snidey and in particular when she was asked a similar question to a one she'd answered earlier gave the reply "I've already answered that question" in a very harsh tone.

I would argue that Sky have a very good political team that if anything are overshadowed by Boulton and don't get as much airtime as they should. I think Joey Jones would make for a superb political editor in a few years.

I might have agreed were Laura K not on the BBC 24/7 and tweeting news when she's not delivering it on camera.

This is the second time Boulton has lost the plot with a guest on air during this election (link to the other in the Guardian article) - and whilst you can excuse one as an aberration, to do it twice is rather more telling.