Channel 4 is frozen

may be Iams wanted to sponsor desperate housewives

is this what happens when we have automated playouts?

a few years back Channel 4 fell off the air one afternoon due to a gas leak, it came back on for Richard and Judy with sound, a green screen and Richard Madley asking if they were actually on air or not

Who'd have thought a few years ago that people would actually be able to moan direct to the continuity announcer when something goes wrong! Loving his continuity showreel on his website too.

Not necessarily. Things went wrong in the days of totally manual playout too, 20+ years ago.

It's not something that could be practically done manually these days

In this case it seems the automation was working correctly, as everything did seem to be playing at the right time, including the frozen ads which did play at the beginning of the following breaks (or at least they did on East/South and London), which would suggest they were correctly cued up by the automation. From the ident it is clear that when HD switched from SD to the HD feed it didn't have any problems.

The message Pete left on his Twitter last night suggests it's the mixer that stopped working.

I've not been keeping up with the Channel 4/ Red Bee news... has Channel 4 itself now moved to the Broadcast Centre?

I know they sent some of the other channels there first, to go wrong for a bit, before they would commit to sending the main channel itself to W12.

All the Channel 4 channels are now at the Broadcast Centre - except for 4 Music, which is still played out from BoxTV, just off Oxford Street.

Is that why every ECP or graphic that appears onscreen by Pres makes the credits juddery, like it hasn't got the processing power to play them normally?