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Channel 4 pre-1993 regional opt outs

Split from Favourite TV Breakdowns (April 2019)

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HC
Hatton Cross
And go headlong into the real possibillity that you'd be airing local adverts, in another region?
"Hello, IBA. Why are you looking like that at us. It's scary"

No. Wiser heads than mine (Hello, Tony Currie) will confirm, but it would have been a case of continuity crashing the 'temporary fault' caption on to air, and padding out with some music, or the duty announcer filling in the calm, manner, expert way they used to.
TJ
TedJrr
robertclark125 posted:
Time to give this thread an airing. We've seen on both here, and the tv breakdowns thread, about when TVS, and once another region, didn't quite get things right during an ad break in the early 80s, on C4. Was it ever possible, if something went wrong, for one ITV region to switch to the advert output of another ITV region, on a temporary basis?



No, the ITV contractor paid an IBA subscription for Channel4. If they failed to sell or play spots, C4's distribution feed had a 'follows shortly' slide relating to the current programme with a laid-back arrangment of Fourscore as a track. I assume that there was a seperate method of distributing timings and leaders into programmes for the ITV contracrors to know what was happening on the network feed. The distro as was, was publically broadcastable.

Daft as it is, I recall multiple 'follows shortly' C4 breaks where I felt sorry for Anglia having not sold spots.....
Last edited by TedJrr on 13 October 2019 4:45pm
SP
Steve in Pudsey
There was a Presfax style text service available to the ITV companies so they had the timings.
BL
bluecortina
TedJrr posted:
robertclark125 posted:
Time to give this thread an airing. We've seen on both here, and the tv breakdowns thread, about when TVS, and once another region, didn't quite get things right during an ad break in the early 80s, on C4. Was it ever possible, if something went wrong, for one ITV region to switch to the advert output of another ITV region, on a temporary basis?



No, the ITV contractor paid an IBA subscription for Channel4. If they failed to sell or play spots, C4's distribution feed had a 'follows shortly' slide relating to the current programme with a laid-back arrangment of Fourscore as a track. I assume that there was a seperate method of distributing timings and leaders into programmes for the ITV contracrors to know what was happening on the network feed. The distro as was, was publically broadcastable.

Daft as it is, I recall multiple 'follows shortly' C4 breaks where I felt sorry for Anglia having not sold spots.....


What’s a ‘distro’?
PE
Pete Founding member
bluecortina posted:
TedJrr posted:
robertclark125 posted:
Time to give this thread an airing. We've seen on both here, and the tv breakdowns thread, about when TVS, and once another region, didn't quite get things right during an ad break in the early 80s, on C4. Was it ever possible, if something went wrong, for one ITV region to switch to the advert output of another ITV region, on a temporary basis?



No, the ITV contractor paid an IBA subscription for Channel4. If they failed to sell or play spots, C4's distribution feed had a 'follows shortly' slide relating to the current programme with a laid-back arrangment of Fourscore as a track. I assume that there was a seperate method of distributing timings and leaders into programmes for the ITV contracrors to know what was happening on the network feed. The distro as was, was publically broadcastable.

Daft as it is, I recall multiple 'follows shortly' C4 breaks where I felt sorry for Anglia having not sold spots.....


What’s a ‘distro’?

distribution
DE
deejay
Well, I’ve not come across “Distro” before. But then again, I’ve never heard of announcers referred to as CAs, but that doesn’t seem to stop anyone on here thinking it’s a widely understood abbreviation!
VM
VMPhil
I only know 'distro' as an abbreviation for Linux distributions.
NG
noggin Founding member
Distro is used as an abbreviation in a number of contexts. Power distribution facilities are also often called 'Distros' too.
MA
Markymark
noggin posted:
Distro is used as an abbreviation in a number of contexts. Power distribution facilities are also often called 'Distros' too.


I've not encountered distro used in the context it was used here, but friends of mine from Arqiva use the term 'dist'
RO
robertclark125
If there was a newsflash that had to be aired after a programme, before an ad break, how would they go about informing the ITV regions? Alter the Prestel system, or phone each regional contractor, or do both?
SP
Steve in Pudsey
Not showing a cue dot until the outro of the newsflash would probably be part of it too.
IS
Inspector Sands
Steve in Pudsey posted:
There was a Presfax style text service available to the ITV companies so they had the timings.

Yes as described earlier in this thread or another somewhere, it was teletext based and called Ident.

Same sort of idea as the BBCs Presfax, but that wasn't teletext based until the 2000s

There was space to put messages on it for such circumstances but a newsflash probably wouldn't have made much difference, they ran the ads when C4 told them to,

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