26th Anniversary of the biggest shake up in ITV

The previous ITV franchise rounds were all flawed in one way or another but at least they limited government involvement. Putting the future of a TV channel in the hands of a politician like that could be an even worse choice than the mistakes of 1991.

One good thing about previous ITV franchise rounds is that it kept ITV companies on their toes. They knew that if they underperformed or were subject to bad management then they could be booted out - like Southern and Westward were. The real danger of a TV channel being at the mercy of the Secretary of State for DCMS is that they may either choose to renew its contract indefinitely unless things turn really sour which can generate a certain degree of complacency and mediocrity within and close the market to new blood, or alternatively results in an almost pot luck situation where whatever happens at renewal time is decided almost by the whims and attitudes of whoever is Secretary of State for DCMS so it can also reduce the incentive to excel.

It often tries to be on Saturday night, if you look at some of the movies it schedules !

Arqiva seems to be the only ones at 27.5w with their broadcast backup services ooh I love to see what their biss encrypted receiver looks like!

At this rate I will have to change the title to 26th Anniversary in 15 days time

And the Arqiva satellite backups there look just to be for PSB1 and PSB3.

(Astra 4.8E seems to have the DAB stuff)

There seems to be no audio tracks on 4.8e or at least my receiver can’t pick them up.

They aren't in an audio format that DVB Receivers can handle, as they aren't aimed at DVB receivers.

They are data streams carrying a DAB Ensemble. https://github.com/piratfm/eti-tools is worth a read. Some other satellite DAB feeds use an alternate approach https://github.com/newspaperman/tsniv2ni

I lost a lot of faith in the mainstream media following the July 7 bombings. The media had effectively jumped to a conclusion without evidence that would stand up in a court of law, so only wanted to publish facts which supported this conclusion whilst ignoring several 'independent' findings and pieces of evidence.

Sometimes I have thought about whether the situation would have been different if in 2005 there had been two separate London based ITV local news services in addition to ITN and the breakfast franchise news.

In response to the first point I feel there was a lot of scaremongering from the media. The references to 7/7 trying to emulate the emotions generated by the horrific events in 2001 plus a graphic in a paper theorising that the attacks were supposed to result in a "map" showing a "burning cross" stand out. (*)


I fail to understand how having 4 news services would have made a difference. Each would have had the same information.

(NB I'm not in any way disparaging the impact of the London attacks at all. I'm making a point at the hysterical language used by the press)

It's well worn, but four sets of video cameras are better than one!

There is a lot of factual material about 7/7 that was never given any coverage in the mainstream media. It is possible that by having four London based ITV news services then they could collectively have broadcast more information.

But not all at the same time. And 7/7 was a Thursday.

In theory there were 4 services, Carlton-LWT, ITN and GMTV but as Neil J notes it was a Thursday. LWT such as it was wasn't broadcasting and neither was GMTV.