ITV Playout

Its a bit of a misconception that the NTC was over invested - it was invested to a level at which they are able to do their jobs and not above.

As to your comments of being wound down, I believe there is a 10 year contract with Thomson, including an initial complete system rebuild.
Far from the sentiments in this thread, Leeds is actually an extremely cheap site to run - simply being outside of London enables this to be the case. It is an ideal location for disaster recovery services such as already provided for ITV and I believe Thomson are interested in promoting this as an asset outside of ITV too.

Not so much a misconception, more based on the fact that Newcastle pres was already a very lean operation (read: they never spent b*gger all on anything ), and the costs of setting up the joint YTV/Tyne Tees presentation centre far outstripped the projected costs of running the two operations separately. It was an act of corporate arrogance on the part of YTV at the time, who could ill-afford to spend such lavish sums on things like the NTC, and the Billingham news operation at the cost of running down the rest of the regional operation, TTTV in particular -- and it has to be said that the only reason it was set up in the first place was that the "cheap" option -- sending TTTV a dirty feed and having Tyne Tees work on top of that -- didn't work too well. There was no reason why they couldn't have perfected it, much as ITV have done with UTV/STV, and indeed TVS/Meridian with Channel.

That's all water under the bridge now though.

There is an anomoly in all this - ISTR that some of the Meridian sub-opts are done in a similar way to BBC opts rather than backhauling to the South Bank.

That's Westcountry, not Meridian, Steve.

Thanks for the correction, Nick - that probably explains why I didn't find much reference to it in searches!

''The dirty feed.''

I say keep the YTV playout, for the current regions, and of course incase if their are problems in London.

"Dirty" in every sense of the word

The first incarnation was to send TTTV whatever YTV were broadcasting, with the ad-breaks hard-switched over the top, so every time they went to an ad-break there was a TV-AM-style glitch in vision, and there were glimpses of YTV logos everywhere where YTV weren't bothering to tell TTTV when to opt out.

They then "fixed" this, playing out TTTV-branded trailers, and then switching to the VT clock of the programme to be played out (at which point TTTV were supposed to opt to their continuity, but once again the messages weren't getting through half the time). Once YTV continuity had finished, the clean feed was once again switched to the dirty one for some reason. That was the theory anyway, and frequently NE viewers would see flickers of the YTV logo as Leeds switched to the dirty feed too soon. Picture the scene -- TTTV not given the correct cue, so they switch from IVC to a static TTTV logo. This is then cross-faded into the programme after a couple of seconds, and half-way through the cross-fade you can see a picture glitch in the background, followed by a 3-way crossfade showing TTTV, YTV and the programme all at the same time. Lovely Either that, or you'd get a Tyne Tees ident with the YTV ident music and announcer cutting in half-way through.

All this was done on the cheap, with no frame-sync, so once again it was screen-roll city for several months. At this point, TTTV took to blatting out everything YTV were sending them and just showing IVC for a minute and a half instead of the trailers/first 10 seconds of programmes, to hide the utter mess that was the "feed" they were getting.

It didn't stop there -- YTV ran tests on the Bilsdale transmitter over the summer of 1993 switching some output directly from Leeds. Unfortunately the equipment they were using was so badly configured that often there would be digital glitches on-screen for 3 or seconds after they'd switched from Newcastle to Leeds and back again. On some days the only stable vision was the stuff coming from the Newcastle continuity desk for some bizarre reason. You could always tell it was going to be one of those days when a cue-dot appeared on the top-left of the screen.

I have never seen such utter broadcasting incompetence in all my born days.

Which makes it all the more amusing that this crock ended up being the hub for half the ITV PLC network....