The Last Leg

That was from The Sun. Are you really wondering why nobody is talking about it yet?

It's probably a silly question for some people on this forum, but am I right in saying that The Last Leg is transmitting to BT Tower, who then send the signal to Channel 4? I'm fairly clueless on how transmission actually works sometimes.

Yeah, BT Tower is an intermediate point for a lot of stuff.

There are fibre optic cables that link broadcasters and facility houses together. In the London area, many of these are routed via the BT Tower. The studio that produces The Last Leg send their output to the BT Tower, where it is routed to C4's playout centre at Red Bee in W12 (the same one the BBC use). From here, further fibre optic cables distribute the output onwards for eventual transmission on Sky, Freeview, Freesat, and Virgin Media

And another stupid question but are the announcers based at the TV stations or at Red Bee?

A piece about C4's playout at Red Bee.

http://www.ipe-products.co.uk/channel4-playout-case-study.php

Why was the reserve link going through BT Tower as well? I thought the usual way was two separate paths?

We don't know it did, it seems to me that the booking slot was the problem, rather than a technical fault with the feeds

It's quite usual to have a main and reserve for a studio production to both go through the tower. Sometimes it can be possible for each to use circuits that end up on different equipment or routers at either BT or the broadcaster which provides some extra resilience

For some locations there's no alternative to using BT tower unless you park a sat truck outside and use a satellite path. Thats only good if the destination has a downlink that doesnt also need BT tower to path on the signal

BT Tower routing is counted as two separate paths by most broadcasters for day-to-day routing - as they have high levels of redundancy in their infrastructure - both in incoming and outgoing lines terms, and internally within the operation, particularly since the major ITV issues a few years ago.

It would probably only be incredibly important high-level stuff (Royal Wedding, Olympic Opening Ceremony etc.) which would have additional redundancy over this level.

Parking a satellite truck outside a studio to backup a non-redundant fibre path, and running a studio on an external twinset (rather than local power), are both approaches I've seen to mitigate risks to high profile studio shows in the past.

And in case anyone wants to see what they missed, here it is without interruption from the 4seven repeat last night.

[media:4760d6fea8]http://up.metropol247.co.uk/062015/1435495016_170310914.mp4[/media:4760d6fea8]
Direct link (MP4, 25.9 MB)

Meanwhile, The Last Leg themselves have uploaded a video of the breakdown recorded from Channel 4 HD, albeit edited down to remove much of the testcard bits and the silence in between announcements.

Why do we think there was a reserve feed from the remote studio to redbee ?

Surely it's just a live remote studio programme going to the tx centre as happens for many hours across the UK everyday with no reserve feeds? I'm missing something here.