Channel 4 pre-1993 regional opt outs

I think the problem with automation is more the small things that get past whoever is monitoring the situation.

For example, a fault with a long history is recorded announcements either totally failing, or going out wrong at every break, either at the same point each day or several in a row across an afternoon or evening.

The sort of sequencing issues that don't trigger any alarms, but just sit there continually going wrong, and making the channel in question look very unprofessional to the viewer.

Especially for audio issues these sort of relatively-minor issues have been known to continue for weeks with no-one noticing.

I’d read more of that, but it’s a pity he has such a ‘potty mouth’.

I only see one instance of swearing?

It's an interesting site generally that, I enjoyed his comments on when he was a VT operator at the low-end playout company.

Reading that though it's no wonder such small, low-budget stations fall off air quite often. He paints a picture of a thoroughly unprofessional setup, with a lack of resources and badly-trained staff. I suspect if a station fell off the map there it'd be quite a while before they managed to sort something out to get it back.

Look through some of the other articles.

Umm, he doesn't do himself an awful lot of credit over the offending Tweet of his he's reproduced, 9 years ago or not, if you want to hurl jokey profanities at friends, great, but not in 'public' !

It's a great blog with some interesting articles (some very niche and nerdy in a good way). I've posted the automation one on here a few times as it's a good explanation of a term that is used a lot without people really understanding what it means.


I hadn't even noticed the offending word, but then I live in the age where the word 's&*t' is pretty tame in real life and pales into insignificance when on the internet with all its horrors

Slightly off topic, but where are the regional playout centres for adverts on Channel 4 located nowadays, and were these centres already channel four premises BEFORE the change in air time selling in 1993?

There aren't any, Channel 4 playout in London (was at Horseferry Road, now its done by Red Bee) does split adverts, sending out 6?* different breaks.


Channel 5 did the same for years (with 4 regions) and of course these days ITV have multiple regional adverts coming out of their playout centres


* known as LEMNUS... London, East/South, Midlands, North, Ulster, Scotland.
They only do one variant of C4 HD which either carries London ads or is sold seperately

There aren't regional playout centres for adverts on Channel 4, I doubt there ever have been since the end of ITV playing them out.

Certainly since it's been at Red Bee, but I'm sure when it was in-house too, the channel has come from one position with all the commercial opts built into the system and coming from the same place.

Lots of channels have commercial opts so it's a fairly routine thing for playout automation to handle, e.g. varients with Irish ads, or sports channels which often have different ads on the commercial premises versions.

That's right. C4 used a Sony LMS system at Charlotte St for the LEMNUS ad playout from Jan 1 1993, until the move to HFR about 18 months later. There it was a D5 based system, (D5 was the chosen tape format for HFR)

So did the old playout system via the ITV regional companies continue past midnight to closedown and they switched over night? I've seen bits of that night in YouTube and noticed nothing out of the ordinary.