Tour de France coverage

Note that the Yorkshire opening stages of the Tour de France next weekend are on ITV(1), somewhat refreshing and a little surprising with the World Cup QFs. on too.

Apparently the London stage on Monday is as well, which is even mor surprising considering it will disrupt the normal weekday line up.

Indeed I noticed that the Monday coverage runs from 12pm on ITV1, with no Lunchtime News. Although I wouldn't be surprised if that changed.

Unlikely to change now as the schedule is locked in - and we all know ITV is getting less and less fussed about dropping the news if they need too. Is surprising though - especially airing it from 12noon. They could have picked it up at 2pm and aired the first couple of hours on ITV4.

Looks like all the ITV(1) broadcasts are also on ITV4.

Watching the Tour de France launch event on ITV4, which has apparently been organised by the same guy behind the Olympic opening and closing ceremonies. I hadn't realised it wasn't live, they've edited it with meat cleaver, crashing into a sting after a few seconds of the performances that are part of the ceremony to cover the cut to the next "meet the teams" bit.

What a terrible programme this is. I can only imagine what it would have been like live. I am just watching it on ITV4+1. The bit at the start where the presenters walk down the stairs in silence was excellent.

Not sure who the Host Broadcaster is for the Tour de France, but they're having all sorts of problems with the picture breaking up, including the race director waving the flag to start the race disappearing into a pixellated mess. Same on Eurosport so can't blame ITV on this occasion.

Host broadcaster I think is France Television (aka FR2/3 the French 'BBC')

I noticed that ITV's captions and DME boxes were breaking up, so their
own facilities are also playing up

I assumed that was a sync issue, if the main picture was unstable anything you super over it could also be a bit of a mess?

The host feed should be fed into ITV's truck via a frame sync (which will be locked to ITV's local syncs), the host may well be giving ITV a reference to lock to too, but if that's unstable, ITV should untether themselves from it, and let their frame sync mop things up. In short ITV's stability of their own pictures should not be affected by FR2's

The "ITV1" swear jar just exploded.

should have got a bigger jar, it was always going to happen.