double Cue dots break:

Over the Past week I have started to notice something a bit odd. I have notice that before a break,

black and white thing appears on the LEFT (still) then a minute later a moving version on the Right appears.

why do you need two?

Cue dots (for that is what they are called) can be positioned anywhere in the frame, and can be used for numerous functions, but are normally seen to cue adverts play out on live programmes. I believe I'm a celebrity normally uses two cue dots, one to cue the sponsorship trails and one to cue the advert break. Obviously if you're cueing two different things, you don't want them in the same part of the picture.

The main reason they're still around is that they are reliable - it's easy to see if the cue dot has appeared on the feed from the production, and it will definately still be there until the cue point unless the whole vision feed goes down (which is a sign of bigger problems!).

If you talking about the cue dot( used for live shows , so regions ect. know that the ad' s are coming) - I think there's two, for example on I'm a celeb as both the sponsorship and ad's aare done from London IIRC , they both need the cue dot's to tell when both are coming.

Hope that makes sense.

Edit : dosxuk beat me to it!!

cue dots used to be really obvious on old tvs, especially going into the ad breaks. I take it modern tvs are designed to crop the image in order to hide them

Quite the opposite. Older tellies (40s,50s,60s models) used to have much more overscan, so usually cropped the dots (very early tellies had round tubes so if you wanted a big picture you lost the corners!). Modern tellies can often be configured with no overscan and thus make them VERY visible.

Presumably with I'm A Celeb the Aussie gallery puts up one set of cue dots to indicate to the London gallery that they are close to firing the sponsorship sting, and the London gallery puts up the second set of cue dots to indicate to ITV playout areas (North, South, Scottish, UTV, Channel) that the ad break is coming up. (I think the cue is when the dots disappear - and it is usually a 5" warning?)

I think it more of a case that in the old days almost all programmes used cue dots (at least on ITV) whereas now, I'm only aware of I'm a Celebrity doing so. This cue dot nostalgia takes place at this time every year

GMTV certainly still uses them to cue regional news inserts. Last time I saw This Morning they were using them.

Remember that on ITV and C4 the cue dot comes from the programme to cue pres (or the ITV contractor which was playing out a recorded programme to cue the other regions), on the BBC cue dots came from pres to cue the next programme.

... and definitely in use during the ITV News when going in to breaks

Aren't they in use on most live shows on ITV1 - so that even if talkback falls over the 2 ITV Plc and 3 non-ITV Plc playout areas can still get a cue for when the break is coming, as they aren't at fixed times in live shows?

Yep - and thus when off-air became delayed (by the introduction of digital MPEG2 compression) they had to stop using them, in case a remote studio or OB was watching a delayed feed.

These days the BBC use them at Wimbledon to signal a 30" warning that the host broadcast output of a court feed is about to switch from multilateral clean to unilateral dirty (i.e. a BBC Sport interview will take place on the court feed). This is to allow other broadcasters to leave the feed in good time. (The cue dots are unusual in that they are 4:3 safe)

The vast majority of modern flat panel TV's, from LCDs to plasmas still have overscan ... some more than others.

Thankfully, if you can access the hidden technician menus on most TV's, regardless of them being flat panel or
old school CRT, any overscan can normally be eliminated completely, and that's one of the things I always do
when setting up a TV. None of my widescreen TV's have any overscan when displaying pictures in 16:9, so I
see the full and complete picture as it was intended to be seen ... including any cue dots.

Nowadays though, is there really any point at all for any TV manufacturer to add overscan to the displays?
Even the streams and WMV downloads on BBC iPlayer seem to have pointless and unnecessary overscan!