Bauer rebranding 53 stations to The Hits/Greatest Hits

Back in the days when it was literally a small PC in a racks room with a video card in.

Does anybody remember the name of the system that The Box and its sister channels were using around that time?

I know it was also in use on Rapture TV.

At one point wasn't The Box based around NTSC laser discs and a standards converter - to allow random access video playback in the days before video servers. (ISTR it had to be NTSC for some reason - possibly because it shared videos with a US equivalent ?)

It was called PresBox and made by a company called AV Developments. Not much of their website survives but here are a few pages which describe the system and the various features

http://web.archive.org/web/20020809161126/http://www.avdev.clara.net:80/applications.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/20020810065437/http://www.avdev.clara.net:80/Products.htm

It was a very basic system running on a standard Windows PC. When The Box switched to this system it was nowhere near ready and suffered regular crashes. It got better but they never truly perfected it.

Yes, from launch until 2000 they used an NTSC laserdisc video jukebox system. I don't think there was any PAL based equivalent.

It was a mechanical system much like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCvrirk5GFg

There was one of those LaserJuke systems at Butlin's in Skegness in the 90s. There was also one at a hotel I stayed at in Spain in 1999, though the newest videos on it were around 18 months old, so I'm guessing they'd stopped supporting it and issuing new discs at some point in late 97/early 98.

One thing about the laserdisc version of The Box is you could have the playlist scroll on screen sometimes for minutes at a time. I assume that's when discs were being cued up, but it did seem suprisingly long, and sometimes there were no gaps between videos at all.

Originally The Box was run locally from each cable company's headends and they each had their own system, I don't think there was a national version until Sky Digital launched in 1998 (though I think there was a version of The Box shown during the downtime of Granada Plus before then), and the local versions slowly switched over to it. Our cable company switched from their own version (which used to be free to call, unlike the national one, so we used to call it repeatedly) in the Autumn of 1999, but I think some cable companies still had their own versions (still run from laserdisc) into 2001. Was certainly being used on some cable companies past the introduction of the digital system to the national version in 2000.

Someone who worked on Rapture once sent me some screenshots of the Windows-based system as they used it, sadly I don't have them any more.

Always remember show poor the picture quality was on the old laserdisc system, though there was a period of a few days not long before they switched systems in 2000 where the picture quality jumped quite significantly, but the other graphics on the channel started loading slowly, like downloading a big picture on a dial-up internet connection. Then the picture quality dropped again and the graphics loaded normally again, so that makes me think there was more to the lower picture quality than just the NTSC conversion, but the system ran slower if the picture quality was higher.

I wonder if any of the laserdiscs still survive, there must have been a lot of them made. I used to love the various programmes and features they had on the channel too, like the BoxTops, Breaking Out Of The Box, BeatBox, BoxTalks etc., all the music channels were a lot better then, there was a lot more to them than just endless streams of videos they became in the early 00s.

Back on topic, GHR (Cornwall) now seems to be routing through Pirate, with local ID’s, news (provided by Pirate), adverts and weather. Obviously will now also take regional drive. Sound quality noticeably worse than when it was the UK feed....

Their schedule still says that Drivetime is being hosted by Darren Proctor and not Tony Wright.

I think it still says that on the Plymouth feed TBF

Same for GHR Lincs. Local news is from Lincs FM and they take the regional drive from Leeds rather than network.

Ah yes, apologies for that (and I know that this conversation has died out now, but just for the sake of completeness) - I've re-uploaded it with a simpler file name: https://up.metropol247.co.uk/madmusician/bbcr2evacuation.mp3

Wish I'd kept the whole c30 minute-long sequence now, including a very good stint of emergency tape. Still, Chris Evans' explanation is interesting (and very similar to the Moyles explanation posted up-thread, even down to making a 'broadcast critical' joke or two!)

Bauer has been allowed to replace Sam FM in Bristol with Hits Radio:

https://radiotoday.co.uk/2020/12/ofcom-allows-hits-radio-to-replace-sam-fm-bristol/