Battle of Northern ITV V Southern ITV

As with the other three channels the feed was off air from the mainland, Stockland Hill in Devon from 82 to 84, then Rowridge IOW from 84 until 92. Unlike other regions I don't think Channel played out the ads, rather they took whatever TSW and then TVS sold and transmitted, and received a pro rata payment (just the same for the rebroadcast national ads on ITV) From 1993, C4 was the first channel on the islands to be fed by fibre optic line, ITV ( still a dirty feed from TVS and later Meridian) followed a few years later.

BBC1 and 2 remained off air fed from Stockland until 2003, when the feed was switched to Astra 28E. Since DSO all three muxes are fed by BT/JT ( or whatever the telco there is called) fibre circuits

It's taken from the live stream on the iPlayer rather than recorded from a separate TV feed.

Is Channel now played out from Chiswick?

In the early days of ITV on DSAT I remember the picture was awful... a bit like an old NTSC conversion to PAL (and possibly still 14:9 but memory may be playing tricks on me) - was this due to the DSAT feed still being sourced from an analogue feed of Meridian?

And if so, what (in technical terms) was stopping them using the DSAT feed of Meridian as opposed to a UHF feed?

The delay I would imagine.

I thought there was a weekly ad playout from TVS to Channel in C4 down time? Like Monday's Newcomers but with VT Clocks etc

No, I don't think it is. They are still fed the 'dirty' Meridian feed. ITV HD is also not available on DTT there, only BBC, and C4.



No. Like all the ITV regions, (inc STV and UTV etc) for D-Sat their output still had to be
be backhauled to NTL, later Arqiva, at Winchester for uplink. So there was a backhaul from CTV to the mainland. The backhaul circuit was lower bandwidth than the main incoming feed, and CTV's infrastructure was also composite, a lethal mixture once it reached the uplink site, and was encoded for final Tx.



As I said, the UHF feed was ditched, (and fibre used) a few years before Meridian was available on D-Sat, so there was never the requirement to make that choice !

Using the D-Sat Astra feed would have been a retrograde step. The Beeb used it of course there (and for Sandy Heath in the two years leading up to DSO, after BBC Cambs relocated). Westcountry ITV also used it to feed the analogue transmitters after the Plympton centre was shut down, though in that case the bit rate of the WTV Astra stream was substantially increased so MPEG artefacts weren't easily visible on the transmitted output. One of those weird British style contradictions, it was OK for direct reception of digital TV to look crap, but not the analogue platform fed through the same system !

It was 09:30 on Friday mornings, only on the Rowridge (and dependants) version of C4. In all other regions the test card and Oracle in vision pages continued. I don't recall any VT Clocks, just a 5 to 10 min lump of commercials