Question Time Fault at Start

Time delaying programmes in some cases is necessary where the general public are involved for various reasons.

I remember in the early 90's, Breakfast Time/News had Nick Whitchell I think interviewing prisoners in a top security prison live.

BBC Lawyers were rather edgy about the situation because of what the prisoners might say. Production insisted the interview be live, but agreed to a delayed feed.

In those days it was very difficult to delay video pictures. The easiest way would have been to bounce the feed onto a few satellites to get a few seconds delay, but that was not financially viable and quality of pictures would be degraded. Instead it was passed through a random acces video player which could store 20 seconds of pics in loop mode, and the sound engineer to add a delay in the audio. It was decided to have a 5 second delay which gave the Producers enough time to hear the raw incoming feed & tell the gallery to cut the interview if required.

I remember News 24 took a feed from the David Shayler press conference in France (the day before he came back across the channel and was arrested) and whoever was presenting at the time pointed out they weren't allowed to show it live, but instead had added a short delay, presumably with someone in the bbc legal department watching and telling them if they needed to pull it.

Delayed feeds don't seem to happen very often though, which is quite nice for democracy/freedom of press etc.

BBC World, which is licenced in the UK by the ITC as it is a commercial service uplinked from the UK, have to conform to obscenity laws etc.

For this reason the live coverage from the US of the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky was delayed via a disc server and delayed on BBC World, to allow it to be previewed to ensure it complied with ITC guidelines.

But why, it is not broadcast in the UK!

Good point. Surely the ITC should concentrate on regulating (if that's what they do) material transmitted to its country of remit. What on earth are they doing vetting television going to other countries? Surely they have their own laws.

No wonder the ITC doesn't have time to do anything useful.

About time-delaying and picture degredation; perhaps this explains why Question Time and Newsnight have always looked like they're being played from a rather worn VHS tape, or as if the picture you see is shot with a camcorder off a video monitor!!!

During all of the 90s and even now, Newsnight's picture quality is always below true broadcast standard, and Question Time has been ever since it became a Mentorn Barraclough Carey Production.

There is also the same 'raining dots' about an inch from the left-hand side of the screen, presumably where blocks of data end. A bit like the periodic dot sparkle that results from mistracking of old programmes recorded on Quad VT.

http://members.aol.com/twothousandtoday/questiontime.mp3 Right-click, Save Target A s. 470Kb

BBC World is broadcast from the UK. As such is regulated by ITC regulations. It doesn't matter if it's not seen here, it has to comply with relevant UK laws

However, like many countries, the UK regulates all channels broadcast FROM within the UK. The ITC is the public body which accepts this responsibility - it is a separate duty to regulating UK commercial broadcasters.

This is particularly the case with some Middle Eastern broadcasters who broadcast from the UK - they have to be careful not to breach the ITCs laws on religious broadcasting etc.

Even though it is made 'as-live' Question Time is recorded at BBC Millbank, not Television Centre. It is also played out live from Millbank TX, rather than being cached to a server in BBC presentation. I think this is because the programme is commissioned by BBC Political Programmes at Westminster, and they need to be able to supervise any editing.

As for Newsnight picture quality... The studio is the same one, with the same cameras, vision mixer, graphics kit etc. as is used for Breakfast, Newsround, Working Lunch, Breakfast with Frost, On The Record etc.

The cameras are the same 16:9/4:3 model used in all other main (i.e. non-news) BBC TVC studios - for programmes like Parkinson, Top of the Pops, The Saturday Show, National Lottery etc...

I'm wondering- how are delayed feeds done these days?

Delayed feeds :

Depends how long the delay is - if it is longer than the length of the programme, then you record it onto VT, rewind it and then play it

However if you need to continuously delay a feed by anything from a few seconds, to a period less than the length of the feed, then the commonly used method is to use a disc server with more than one port capable of simultaneous record/replay. You record the programme on one port on the server, and can then start replaying whenever you like, whilst still recording on the original. This is how some BBC Nations delay their network feed to timeshift programmes by short periods, and how News 24 can delay press conferences (often needed when two live events take place at almost the same time)

In the old days, before disc servers, you needed quite a few VTRs and some skilled operators (and often an AP/Director) to co-ordinate recording, rewind and playback across multiple VTs, slaving two playback VTs together via timecode to allow a seamless switch between different recordings. The shorter the delay the more often you had to switch between recordings - so delaying by an hour was much easier than delaying by 10 minutes...

This could also be used to remove the intermission from live opera concerts etc. You'd delay the first half by a roughly the length of the intermission, and are then able to join the second half almost live or live.