ITV Network Transmission Issues

In general, UTV is unmanned from about midnight. So, no one to cut up a holding routine.

I've been told this is the case even when they are transmitting local programming at that time of night... in this case, a 'pulse' from London, is used to switch the UTV mixer back to the network feed at the correct (not always) time.

If TVC was still up, it'd be possible (at a push) to put other sources onto the networks. The regions could opt in and individually provide their own programmes, but as the Inspector says, they wouldn't really have that much to play. There are contingency plans, but they can obviously only go so far!

Sorry if I missed this if it's already been explained... but I saw this fault and was just wondering how/why some regions got Central News at lunchtime on Friday -

Is Central the fallback region rather than London if the next region's news is not available (eg: Westcountry would take West normally if there was a problem)?

London Today seemed to go out OK so I was just wondering why everybody seemed to get Central rather than London or the next region's news.

I know that Tyne Tees and Yorkshire usually take the Granada News, and ITV Wales takes ITV West's news.

It's because the feeds to the transmitters and uplink of the southern regions was switched from London to Leeds, presumably at BT Tower. I guess it's then up to Leeds what region goes out, with Central making the most sense being the most southern of the northern regions. London was changed back prior to the regional news bulletin. Also, the feeds to the transmitters changed back to London reasonably quickly, but for some reason satellite stayed with Leeds, meaning the 4PM regional news programmes didn't make it to air on satellite, yet were broadcast on analogue and Freeview.

I don't know if anybody else saw but there was a fault with ITV2+1 yesterday.
I turned over at 2.20pm and there was a fault caption with a looped voiceover.
it came back a couple of minutes later but I have my freeview 4:3 panscan mode so when ITV2+1 Came back it came out as 16:9.
Eventually at 8.00pm it went back to the correct screensize.

All the ITV sat feeds were (are ?) assembled at an Arqiva site in William Road (Euston) before travelling to Winchester for uplink. I assume there's a pipe from the South Bank, and another from Leeds to feed William Road.

If the South Bank pipe had failed, it might well have been Arqiva that rerouted Central to all the missing D-Sat regional feeds from South Bank. That could well have been done at their Crawley Court control room, and nothing to do with Leeds. Arqiva also route DTT and analogue signals to from the Tx sites, so similar re-routing might have been applied by them too.

I was on the understanding that all the routing was done by the TV Network Switching Centre in BT Tower, particually as after the overnight power failure, the TC at the time said on Digital Spy that BT Tower switched the transmission from London to Leeds.

ITV 1 Meridian went to a black screen on DSAT during Sundays Coronation Street omnibus. The 'press red' logo was still there but there was no subtitles. This lasted for a couple of minutes. Other regions that I checked on DSAT were fine.

BT may well look after London-Leeds links, but the London to Astra uplink circuits are provided by Arqiva

That may be the case for the routing between playout centres - but Arqiva are responsible for the compression and uplink to the Astra satellite, and also run the ITV analogue and digital transmitters (though possibly not the links to them?)

The old IBA transmitter network division was bought by NTL, and they were in turn bought/rebranded as Arqiva.

AFIK this is indeed the case. When CTV D-SAT was a rather sad aspect ratio, and clearly went through a PAL stage, CTV were adamant that this was not their fault. Video routing within the DTT building was SDI, apparently the blame lay with Jersey Telecom on the Fremont Point <> ST Helier trombone link.