Channel Television during the 1979 ITV Strike

I’m sure I read somewhere they also made a Portuguese bulletin for a while as there was a reasonably sized Portuguese migrant labour population.

Yes they did. I think it was on sundays?

Looking at the 1981 IBA Handbook, Channel introduced ENG and abandoned film in November 1979, very shortly after the end of this strike.
Were they the first ITV station to do that?

That, and the conversion of signals from Secam to Pal..

I think they were, especially as some ITV regions were still using mostly, or entirely, film on news well into the 80s. TVS and TSW definitely were.

They were trialling ENG from about 1977, using loan kit from RCA. I think they were not only the first ITV company to adopt it, they were the first UK broadcaster to use it. The main impediments to ENG adoption were industrial, not technical

I thought Grampian was the first to adopt ENG? Their large geographic size meant it was the obvious station to use it first

I think they were second, albeit a close second ? !

By the way, according to the 1973 ORTF yearbook (the only one ever published before the broadcaster was dismantled), Inter 3 on the ORTF's Third Channel became the first newscast in Europe to be produced entirely using videotape technology (ENG) that year.

Yes ir was Grampian:
https://twitter.com/tvark

Wasn't that the case for switching away from film in general?

The IBA had a series of technical standards, one of which related to cameras. In respect of ENG, the only standard applied was that the output had to be perceptively better than 16mm reversal film.

Wasn't the main challenge the disruption to working practices and the potential for crew size reduction. #

At its simplest, an ENG unit could run with one camera operator with a transportable U-Matic recorder strapped-on. That's a lot of weight, and a lot of job reductions. An alternative is for the camera operator to be cabled to the sound recordist, who is also the video recordist.

So, Grampian, Border and Channel adapt easily (relatively so), rather than losing jobs gaining more content. The rest would just see reductions in film crew size, and hence have an industrial relations snafu.

Nowadays you see (at least in regional BBC outfits) a single journalist, carrying a camera and tripod, making and editing a story for TV, web and local radio having driven there themselves. In film days there could have been three, four, five unit crews plus a driver and reporter. Then there were film editors, and the people that operated the processing plant (nasty chemicals!).....

.... and then there was the logistics of getting pictures back to base. Anglia used to fly a light aircraft between Hull (Brough), odd airfields in Lincolnshire and Norwich Airport. Yorkshire had their own helicopter. ENG had the possibility of using ad-hoc microwave into collection points, so the potential overall for job losses was huge.