UKTV name to return to on-screen branding

This?:

Sadly, no. Take the logo (as below, without black disc) but CGI rendered as 3D frosted glass and centred across the screen, with live action continuing in the background.

http://www.theidentgallery.com/dave/2011/DAVE-2012-BB-REDDWARF-1-4.jpg

A Christmas advert was just shown on dave! The only thing they changed was added 'this spring' on the end. It had baubles and bells in the music and everything.

Yes, I've seen it too, it's a mickey-take out of Sky's adverts. The tagline at the end is "Believe in Banter"

Thank you! That's the one.

Witty?

http://tig.gy/?m=dave-safr.jpg

Impressive that they can react that quickly in these days of automated playout.

Automated doesn't mean inflexible, technically it's not difficult to do at all.
What is impressive is that someone at UKTV had the idea and actually managed to get it on air.

I'd say so.

That's my point; in these days of automated playout (external to the broadcaster and prepared many days/weeks in advance) that somebody somewhere had an idea and got it to air the same day.

I agree there's nothing technically impressive.

As the Inspector said, automation doesn't mean a rigid schedule, in fact the schedules of commercial channels always change considerably on the day because of ad 'spot changes'. When I worked there, overnight an enormous list of all the spot changes would be sent to the playout suite and you'd have to sit there manually changing all the ID codes of all the ads, working out which ones were missing (there were inevitably lots) and asking Ingest to try and track them down. I think the production of these interstitials still remains with Red Bee, so if channel management want to react in this way it's a case of Creative Services making up the graphic and 'delivering' it to the playout suite (which these days is probably a matter of ftp-ing a file onto the transmission server and getting the playout staff to change the Clip ID in the schedule).

It would arguably have been more difficult to have done it a few years ago, when someone would have had to have got an edit suite, booked an editor and possibly a graphics operator and voiceover artist, recorded the item, dubbed the item, entered the details into the logging system, phone the playout suite to tell them of the change, and that's before you've even delivered the transmission tape.

Ahhah - well I'm still impressed that something like this did happen. My impression of automated playout, particularly the way Red Bee do it, was that it's taken well away from the management of the channel.