Scottish switchover

Even if they wanted to, I'm not sure that they could - I believe the analogue network chain in PQ is just fed from the DTT output (via an ARC). It's probably possible to do an analogue split with a bit of creative pluggery - but that's not trivial these days either.

For those who missed Wales' effort, it's at http://youtu.be/Er4UyIqC2s4

I'm a little surprised STV didn't pull anything out of the bag. I guess S4/C might not have if they weren't effectively closing an entire service.

I suspect as 'thegeek' has said about BBC 1 Scotland, STV's analogue tx chain is similar, so it would involve too much 'pluggery' with costs money, which doesn't exist for this sort of thing.

To be fair, BBC Bristol did split their Digital and Analogue outputs for 5 mins during the final analogue Points West, so nothing's impossible !

True, I guess Wales had the facility to do different things on digital and analogue for 2W, and it was probably as easy to engineer it so there could be a 1W if it were ever needed when they commissioned the new pres suites there.


Live to the Nation by MuppetLabs, on Flickr

When the last one goes they might well mark it nationally, I'm sure that there will be a big fanfare when Crystal Palace goes next April

Oh yes, I expect there'll be all sorts of London centric nonsense, like 'UK switchover is finally underway, after trials in other parts of the UK have proved successful'. Wouldn't surprise me if national Ceefax pages suddenly stop being updated from that point too !!

Considering only 2 regions will be able to pick up Ceefax after that date, It seems like a wise move.

BBC Scotland used to have to kill off the Digital feed during live Scottish football, so I can be done!

Yes, they'll have to call it a day at some point. I don't know how much work goes into it these days (the content is shared with digital text so it'll just be ported from there) but will it be worth carrying on until the last transmitter is turned off?

They only had to cut the D-Sat distribution, not DTT.

Even though they would probably have built that functionality into their new building, they might not have bothered with providing an easy analogue split

It was certainly planned in advance, although only done on the day. It didn't require any over patching - the facility to split analogue, DTT and DSat was built into the opt-out router, and indeed remains for the latter two. Certainly at some point last year there was an outage on DTT, and we were able to put an apology at the end of the programme on DTT, without affecting DSat.

The 'end of analogue' sequence was labour intensive in that it took two people a few hours to plan and put together IN THEIR OWN TIME, but TXing it was simply a matter of pressing the right buttons at the right time. The beancounters - and indeed the licence fee payers - had nothing to worry about

I should add that the the engineering staff at Wenvoe were fully aware of what was going to happen and when, and appreciated the efforts taken to properly mark the closure of the transmitter.

As far as I remember, BBC Choice Wales used a dog throughout - albeit that it had to move (known in the department as 'walking the dog') to accomodate the sport clock for rugby and football matches. The dog on 2W was, however, short-lived.

The Life on Mars idents were done simply because the original model was to hand and working, and looked a whole lot better than the CGI mock that network were using. We also had access to two announcers from the 70s/80s who happened to be in work at the time, enabling us to use them at no extra cost. In fact, the globe footage used for the end of analogue sequence was that shot for the LOM idents! As far as I now remember, the
ident used for Ashes to Ashes was the Wales branded version of the BBC One Audi Quatro ident.

S

Thanks for the info Steve, very interesting. There was certainly a period about 10 years ago when BBC Choice Wales did not carry a DOG. The repeat of the BBC 2 series 'Attachments' I deliberately watched on BBC Choice Wales, because it was DOG free on there !