Emergency Alert System

MA

Markymark 29 April 2007 11:02am

Steve in Pudsey posted:

That could have been interesting, BBC Sport presentation (as ITV wouldn't have had time to set anything up) on ITV, with ad breaks...

Of course that situation was unlikely to have happenned, there would always have been some method of bodging it together on that night

Well, I wonder. ITV would have been commentating on the match, and recording it for a highlights programme later that night. So they would have had their own coverage of the match itself readily available. Punditry would have been a problem, and as you say, commercial breaks.

I think a neater solution would have been for the output from Holland to have been directly connected to the Energis distribution network. Probably not so easy.
In the old days of monopoly BT/GPO distribution it would have just required a couple of patch cords at the Tower !

SP

Steve in Pudsey 29 April 2007 11:10am

although given that there are downlink facilities at many BBC buildings, all on the Energis network, a lash up seems perfectly feasible

IS

Inspector Sands 29 April 2007 1:07pm

Davidjb posted:

With regards to the BBC power failure a few years ago this caught people out because the back up generators originally kicked in at TVC loosing the panic of falling off air. Only when the generators themselves decided to catch fire was there a problem. The generators are their primarily to keep all broadcast areas and facilities running. IIRC News 24 lost a lot lighting so took the 6 O'clock news (because it didn't used to back then) which was evidently struggling for power and it was about halfway through the 6 that it all died. Most News staff made a run for Mill Bank (Westminster) which was unaffected. Somewhere down the line TX got BBC One onto the football as scheduled (whether this was done remotely from Pebble Mill i dont know). .

As I mentioned earlier, the TX areas remained powered.

Dads Army and the programmes on BBC2 at the time were from Brum (although as it turned out they didn't need to be), the football came via London - there was a rough jump cut to it and was in widescreen - which wouldn't have been the case via Pebble Mill

SP

Steve in Pudsey 29 April 2007 1:16pm

I thought the network production side of Pebble Mill was widescreen capable?

IS

Inspector Sands 29 April 2007 1:34pm

Steve in Pudsey posted:

I thought the network production side of Pebble Mill was widescreen capable?

That's a good point (even though of course there isn't much diffrence between widescreen and 4:3 SD equipment... you can play 16:9 from a 15 years old Beta SP machine). Thinking about it, to get the footie via brum would probably have meant just pointing a dish in the right direction and feeding it down the line

99% sure that it did come via TV Centre though, things had calmed down and stabalised by then. I remember the cut between the Brum output and the footie was fairly rough. BBC2 changed over to scheduled programme (from London of course) around the same time too

(April 2007)