80s Channel 4 Commercial Breaks....

I see what you're saying, and I may be wrong myself, but I don't think the GMTV feed ever went 'through' the regional programming contractor, or ITV station. True that the local news itself was provided by the ITV station, but I believe the switching was all done by London, who opted the local news into the feed, rather than the ITV station opting-out. If that makes any sense!

Therefore, for example: Local News --> GMTV --> Transmitters

Channel 4 --> Regional contractor/ITV station --> Transmitters

Until ITV plc moved to a model of London and Leeds being their only playout centres, GMTV did indeed go through the regional contractors who would opt out to drop in their local news in a very similar style to how the BBC do their regional opt outs.

That's how GMTV and UTV fell out when the latter did an unauthorised opt-out to cover some breaking news. This led to GMTV finding somebody else to do their regional news service in Northern Ireland.

Once ITV1 changed to the current model of centralised playout, each regional studio feeds to London or Leeds and is cut to line much like they are for any other live regional programme.

Thanks for clarifying, Steve.

A couple of examples here of the captions used in early 1983 which explained the lack of ads to viewers:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqO-wzMD1OE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5sxqqlOlMI

Just remembered something strange happening one afternoon in late 1984. During most of the commercial breaks that afternoon, Tyne Tees managed to opt-out in sound only; we heard the ads, but all we could see on screen was the C4 break-filler slides. Very odd - I wonder what could have happened?

TVS filled every C4 break from day one, by stuffing them full of CoI films, and multiple showings of local/cheap ads.
I remember one ad for instant Chinese food, that appeared at least once per break !

The other extreme was TSW, they didn't do a thing, until mid January 1983, so over two months of the C4 sustaining feed during breaks. After a while C4 became quite adventurous with their Aston, particularly at peak times.

I think Thames and LWT filled the breaks, in a similar manner to TVS ?

I saw some late night breaks in the Central region, and they only had one or two ads, before opting back mid sustaining feed.

does any one know how the transmission chain for gmtv northern ireland/daybreak northern ireland news bulletins works? does it go through utv's presentation area?

Officially, managementwise , what is the difference between GMTV & 'Daybreak', as you would've thought 'Clean slate, let UTV & STV do the local news again, not these MacMillan people?'

The cost of terminating a fixed-length contract early?

ISTR that the "automated" system Tyne Tees had for controlling C4 adbreaks was a bit Heath-Robinson -- there was a manual control that was manipulated in a kind of robotic style by the CATS system.

Might be totally wrong, but could the piece of duct-tape have snapped, leaving the device only controlling one fader?

EDIT: shows how much I know about these things, this is/was apparently standard practice with analogue faders. Still, the idea stands, presumably the interface between controller and desk wasn't quite right for whatever reason.

Contract was with GMTV, who are no longer around, contract is now Void!

It's still around, just under a different name

Strange thing about occasion is that halfway after spending all afternoon watching only the caption and hearing the soundtrack from the ads, halfway through one such break around 5ish, the screen switched from the caption to some sort of static/interference for a few seconds then the ads appeared as usual. Almost as if they were rectifying the fault during that break, and obviously hadn't been able to do so earlier.



Marky, thanks - that's exactly the sort of info I'm after!

I'm not going to litter this thread with examples of captions available elsewhere, but this in an example of things going a bit wrong in YTV land (cue dot didn't disappear when it should have done, which may have caused a problem with the automation):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GosWw2GJLU

And an example here of a 'live action' film used during an interlude (there were others featuring aerial views of London and views from a train driver's cab):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVHw8F8h-wk

Stumbled across a very interesting find - an advert-free break from December 1992:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBZTYHXcfiM

This shows that there were break fillers on the sustaining feed right up to the end of 1992, but I imagine it must have been very rare for these to actually be shown, ie. a region not filling the breaks with ads, by this point. Interesting to see how this break slide differs from the early examples. I wonder what region it was recorded from, and why there were no ads in the junction?