Sky News presentation - new newswall

Flexibility. Much easier to use a spare studio that's free more often than a studio which is pretty much in use 24 hours a day.

Hope this is a permanent thing.

Have managed to get it to play via my XBMC setup and makes a fresh change to watching BBC World and the quality of the stream is very good. Used to get Sky News via a TV package but it was removed at the start of the month, now I don't need to subscribe to OSN to get back.

Where to begin? (I speak, by the way, as someone who's been at a recording of this programme)

a) It's aimed at the U.S. market - if recording at 1130, that would mean getting guests out of bed in time for 0630 on a Saturday morning, or even earlier depending on what part of the States they're in.
b) You couldn't staff a secondary gallery that well on a Saturday morning.
c) The majority of guests are on Skype - if one (or more) of the lines falls down, you throw what would be a live programme into jeopardy.
d) Martin (or whoever's doing the telly shift) needs to be on-call for breaking news during the sports programme.

Not sure I agree about the reflections. Because Martin doesn't have a reflection, putting in reflections of the virtual screens just emphasises the lack of reality to me and gives Martin a 'floating' look. I wish VR studio designers would design sets with matte floors occasionally...

I suppose this shows how hit and miss Skype can still be, even considering Skype TX's introduction (with so much of it relying on a contributor's connection quality).

Skype TX is just the Cat and Mouse Skype system that Microsoft acquired Cat and Mouse (who were more well known for game show graphics systems) for isn't it?

ISTR it was developed for The Million Pound Drop and I believe also used on early series of Sunday Morning Live. The main functionality it offered was a clean SDI / HD-SDI output of the Sky caller with no intrusion of Windows etc., proper analogue or AES input for clean-feeds, as well as a decent call management front-end which offered similar functionality to phone-in systems like Phone Box, as well as some quite clever multi-caller multi-screen outputs.

What it doesn't do is anything significant to improve call quality or reliability, it just makes it easier for broadcasters to integrate into studio production set-ups, removing the need for Heath Robinson set-ups with scan converters etc.

Not really a fan of this sofa, shape/colours.

But I am!

The way you said that makes it sound like you're meaning what you say is final and it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks...

Does anyone know why Skynews got apparently rid of the qatar weather stings constantly, has the contract ended?

Sky News logo has been missing from the screen for at least the last 15 minutes...

EDIT - Returned at 9am.

Pistorious sentencing ran over the 11am TOTH so Sky continued with it, then the feed failed so they ran the TOTH at 11 mins past. Do they usually do this?