Broadcasting 101

Wow! what an explanation
https://gph.is/g/aQWlJWA

To add to this, Red Bee Chiswick (called ITV Presentation) look after playout for the main ITV network feed which contains all the network programming, promotions and branding (idents, menus, etc), but doesn't contain any adverts. They also look after playout for all the southern regions (Central and below) and UTV, which takes the network feed and adds the adverts and local programming on top of it. Red Bee Leeds look after all the northern regions and ITV Wales in exactly the same way as Chiswick does.

They run all the regions off playlists on their automation system (Morpheus) which are linked (slaved) to the network playlist, so as soon as the network playlist reaches an ad break/local programme event all the regional playlists automatically and simultaneously start playing their local content. The automation in London and Leeds are linked, so the regional playlists in Leeds are triggered automatically just as the ones in London are.

The odd one out in this is STV in Scotland, as they have their own playout operation separate ITV Pres, so they opt in and out of the network feed from Chiswick to playout their own local branding, programmes and ads. I'm not sure how they coordinate ad times with Chiswick, but I suspect it's a combination of invisidot (cue dots in the blanking) and talkback.

Has there been a change in recent years. I thought Leeds did Central, and Chiswick looked after legacy HTV West and Wales?

I thought the same about Central, when the Southern playout was at the South Bank and they were out of action due to power issues Leeds were able to feed a Central-produced bulletin to the whole of the south of England/CI/Wales.

I also thought UTV was looked after by Leeds, I think there's a reference in that Julian Simmons documentary to getting the timings through from Leeds.

UTV playout is at Chiswick.

Central and Wales swapped around some time ago. I can't recall exactly when it was, but I think it was around the time playout moved from the old Southern Transmission Centre at TLS to Chiswick Park.


UTV is definitely from Chiswick, it has been since it became fully ITV integrated. I'm not sure the reason why, but I imagine it's to do with it being more complicated to look after, given the different branding (pre-COVID anyway) and greater number of programming variations. ITV Pres at Chiswick are used to handling that sort of thing, whereas Leeds probably isn't.

The documentary you refer to is from UTV had their own playout in Belfast. Although they took the network feed from London (but likely via Leeds), I imagine ITV treated them similar to their northern regions and had them communicate with Leeds. Also I know currently a lot of ITV scheduling is based in Leeds, I receive timing emails from them every day which often come from the Leeds based team, so it's very possible that was also the case then.

Is STV’s feed clean or dirty, I remember they used to have to work with a dirty feed for a while and it was quite a mess on screen at times

I've never heard the term "hard break" before, but you'll often hear a PA tell the presenter that a count is a "hard count", i.e. one they absolutely have to talk to with no wiggle room to go over or under by a few seconds. This is more about them making sure they come off air or join a particular live event at the correct/agreed time than anything related to automation playing breaks at a fixed point.

Yes, I've never heard the term either, but it sounds similar to 'hard count' or 'fixed end time'


One good example of what I assume is a 'hard break' and a 'soft break' is Sky News' for most of the time the gallery will tell TX when to go to a break, except at the top of the hour when TX will go to the break at a fixed time of something like xx:57:30. All the gallery have to do is stop for the correct number of breaks in the hour and then stop before they get cut off.

I know Al Jazeera English is similar, there the programme clock is quite rigid and they must be out of the half hour bulletins at xx:33 because the back half hour programmes are all a fixed length.

So going back to the original question, do the breaks within the regional news have to be all at the same time or do they not have them because they can't be at different times in different regions?

Pretty sure Sky News has hard breaks.

As I understand it generally only the xx:57 break at the top of the hour is fixed, so that they hit the start of the next hour on time. The rest of the breaks in the hour are usually manually triggered by TX when the gallery tell them to.

This can vary however as the international feed sometimes opts out and shows different programming, in which case they will need the go to a break on time so that the international feed can start it's programming and cleanly opt back in at the right time.


During live regional programming (e.g. news), the breaks will be on a fixed time so that they start at the same time on all regions simultaneously.

The automation will happily let each region go to a break at a different time, but that becomes a burden on the operator who would be trying to juggle different breaks times from each region, not to mention very error prone as it's easy to hit 'take next' on the wrong region's playlist. So they fix it for simplicity. In fact currently I don't think they go to a break in regional news at all.

Recorded regional programmes are different, as they're all programmed in ahead of time they can all be setup to sequentially run with their own break times. Not that ITV has many (any?) these days.