Power cut at Dutch public broadcaster

Yesterday evening, there was a huge power cut at the Dutch public broadcasting service in Hilversum. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24803002?SThisFB. The programmes were interrupted for about half an hour between 23h and 23h30 on Nederland 1 (the main tv channel) and some 3/5 radiostations. The other channels tuned in 15 minutes later again. The power failure started at around 22h30 at the Dutch version of Match of the Day, called Studio Voetbal. The show continued by candlelight.

The cause of the power cut was a test in the emergency electricity supply, which was done the wrong way. Apparently, they had to test the museum nearby, but the power company managed to cut off the entire Media Park, as the complex is named.

The NPO announced an investigation.

More can be found here: http://nos.nl/artikel/570607-geen-rtvuitzendingen-door-storing.html

Power testing going wrong was a BBC speciality about 10 years ago of course!!

It's interesting to see how much stuff stayed on and that the football show continued to transmit (or is that a recording of studio-out, which may or may not have actually gone to air?). It's true though that back up power supplies only power a few essential bits of kit and generally not production lighting, which in the past was very power hungry. These days with LED and discharge lighting fixtures it's probably more likely that an almost full rig could be maintained for a time.
Interesting to see behind the scenes at NOS, looks like a very recent development?

I was on the project team that built that facility, it was 'greenfield' 2005/6, I'm sure it's evolved
since then, but it all looked strangely familiar !

The show was broadcast live. By then, they had minimal power supply from the emergency generator. About half an hour later, the power cut entirely.

If I'm not mistaken the NOS building was reconstructed indeed in 2005/6, only slight changes since then. They combined all forms of news gathering in one news floor, they used to have seperate news floors for radio, television, teletext, youth news, sports, etc. This show has some nice newsfloor shots: http://programma.ntr.nl/10495/achter-het-scherm/archief/detail/aflevering/13212510/Bij...-het-Journaal.

Yes, they unified all of NOS's TV and radio production activity on one floor (the 3rd floor I think), though the larger two TV studios remained occupying the ground/first floor levels. Those studios are rented out to independent production companies. It's all very complicated, NOS are the public broadcaster, but most of the non news programming is farmed out to indies (but the editorial control/responsibility does not belong to NOS, unlike indie prods in the UK) . NOB (now Ericcson) were the facilities arm that was split off from NOS (very similar to the BBC and Siemens/ATOS). The media park at Hilversum is a really nice place, everybody wanders in out of competitor broadcaster and facilities buildings in a friendly and casual manner (or they did when I was working there 8 years ago)