TI
BBC One Northern Ireland showing Eastenders as scheduled. Good old BBC NI keeping the show on the road!
JV
James Vertigan
Founding member
It will be interesting to see what they do in order to get to the 10 on time - Can’t see News delaying that although they have done in the past because of football...
OV
Speaking from experience, it's not easy.
If it's the automation or playout server that's gone haywire you're usually very stuck as modern TX suites have limited options that don't involve them, minus a hard cut on the router to a fault slide or a live/backup source if one is available.
It's very unusual for this to happen however as automation systems and playout servers usually run with a fully seperate backup copy for redundancy, so if the 'A' chain goes down the 'B' one should still be operational.
If it's not the automation with the problem it can be hard to change and override the playlist last minute. They're very rigid in that they will run exactly what they're programmed to run, so when you're in a panic trying to quickly put in new 'events' to get your channel back on air it's very easy to accidentaly type in an invalid code or time which results in it rejecting and skipping over the event or cutting to a frozen image, as happened here. This is especially the case if a less experienced operator is the one manning playout.
I've had a few occasions where channels have fallen off air while I've been operating the playout, and had to resign myself to the fact I'm going to be stuck with a frozen image or bars going out for a couple mins while I try to reprogram the automation and sort it. I've also had a few occasions where my rush to correct it and hit 'play next' has resulted in me screwing it up and making it worse.
It's up there with The Family Brain Games nightmare from a couple of years ago. Makes you wonder just how easy it is to wrestle any kind of control back from the automation (assuming that's what's gone wrong).
Speaking from experience, it's not easy.
If it's the automation or playout server that's gone haywire you're usually very stuck as modern TX suites have limited options that don't involve them, minus a hard cut on the router to a fault slide or a live/backup source if one is available.
It's very unusual for this to happen however as automation systems and playout servers usually run with a fully seperate backup copy for redundancy, so if the 'A' chain goes down the 'B' one should still be operational.
If it's not the automation with the problem it can be hard to change and override the playlist last minute. They're very rigid in that they will run exactly what they're programmed to run, so when you're in a panic trying to quickly put in new 'events' to get your channel back on air it's very easy to accidentaly type in an invalid code or time which results in it rejecting and skipping over the event or cutting to a frozen image, as happened here. This is especially the case if a less experienced operator is the one manning playout.
I've had a few occasions where channels have fallen off air while I've been operating the playout, and had to resign myself to the fact I'm going to be stuck with a frozen image or bars going out for a couple mins while I try to reprogram the automation and sort it. I've also had a few occasions where my rush to correct it and hit 'play next' has resulted in me screwing it up and making it worse.