Wrong Regional News....what happened?

After the main BBC 10 o'clock News, went to join the "newsteams across the UK"....

...a moment of blank screen, then instead of going to BBC in the West here, up came some titles I didn't recognize, and oh look, I received BBC LONDON by accident!

Part way through, it cuts back to the West in the last moments of a Special Report, and even then, the final seconds were spent with a shot of the oblivious newsreader in the studio, while the audio from the report continued.

What's going on with these BBC One hiccups? strange how over the last few days I've seen occasional continuity announcer problems, ident music mess-ups or other glitches.

From your description of what happened, it sounds like some sort of intermittent fault with the opt mechanism / transmission chain in Bristol.

I very much doubt that this was in anyway linked with the other problems you have noticed on BBC ONE. They were most likely caused by the continuing teething troubles with the new playout automation.

I've noticed a few times that the BBC1 West idents stall and suddenly return to the main London intro.

That sounds like a coincidental cock-up.

Although it may be possible that the whole thing was caused by a problem with the vision mixer.

I think I'm right in saying that the 'opt' in some regions is controlled by a GPI which is triggered by the vision mixer being cut away from network to a local source (anyone know if this still happens?). If there was a problem with the vision mixer it may have led to both opting problems and the newsreader being cut to air at the wrong time. The opt problem may not have affected all platforms.

BTW - before someone else starts moaning... this thread should probably be in the News Forum. Perhaps a moderator could move it for us before the picky-people start to yap.

Denton, your theory sounds most likely. I know DTT is opted seperately, and that David who was presenting would have been none the wiser. The trouble is, they might have known in the gallery, but if it was going out on DTT they would have had to have continued regardless. Certainly on cable it opted fine, and I expect when comms noticed the show hadn't gone to air properly they would have done it manually.

The suggestion further up that it was another 'automation hiccup' is rubbish - there is no such system in Bristol.

The DTT opts are driven by the "Network source" red lights switching system in pretty much every English Region I believe (Hull may be different) - though not in the Nations where there are presentation areas.

The BBC One DSat and DTT feeds are fed from the same opt-out vision mixer in English regions, but MPEG2 coded separately (because DSat and DTT use different aspect ratio switching systems). If there was a fault (or a faulty report of a fault condition) - then the locally encoded DTT BBC One feed would be bypassed, and the pre-encoded BBC One London feed would pass-through Bristol.

The analogue opts are still mainly "network through the desk" soft-opts in most regions (London is different as it either crash opts, or is cut up by the network news or presentation area) and independent of any "red light" switching scheme AFAIK.

This is the case even in 16:9 "digital" regions (apart from London) - though the soft-opt point is more visible in these areas as you see at least two frames of delay and some softening as a PAL decode/ ARC to 14P16/ARC to 14L12/PAL encode is added to the analogue transmitter path. Most analogue 4:3 (14:9) regions don't introduce any delay at the soft-opt point (Cambridge is different) - so apart from a slight NICAM audio splat and a possible slight vision level change - the soft opt point should be less visible (though some regions may introduce a single frame of delay if they synchronise rather than genlock)

We got BBC London instead of Look North for the 5.10 as well.