UTV rebrand

I'm quite surprised he's coming in every day on the days his announcements are going out to be honest. What a waste of time... just record a few generic announcements and be done with it. It's not as if ITV make anything that's of any real worth anyway is it - the odd drama, and variants of American formula TV (soaps, game shows, Jerry Springer / Judge Judy clones etc).

[quote="MMcG198" pid="1031792"]

UTV was a local company, both in terms of premises and ownership, where BBC NI is just part of the BBC. That appeals to people. Now I've already said that I find Newsline better than UTV Live. But the latter has higher viewing figures.

I'll make a note of that

[quote="Richard" pid="1031871"]
This might be a totally misguided suggestion but is it possible that a lot of republicans simply refused to watch the BBC?

Quite surprised as well as the announcements are still only during prime time viewing. I wouldn't have thought that's a full time job.

A complete puff-piece from The Irish Times which fails to address the fact that his act has completely changed and any personality that existed has now been ripped apart.

Fair play to Julian himself - I'm not sure whether the paper approached him, or Julian via ITV approached them, but it's allowing him to eventually go with a bit of dignity.

ITV isn't daft - it knows that after a few months/a year of this Julian and Gillian will probably have found new gigs, what little difference there was between ITV and UTV output will have long gone, they'll have installed a respected weekly political show and no-one apart from those of us who are a little bit more anoraky will really notice much of a difference when the UTV name is finally retired.

It could easily have just made it ITV immediately, and I'm not sure there would have been any major backlash, but why take the risk when you can guarantee everything will go smoothly?

Fantastic news he will be covering for Frankie Mitchell. He must be due a day off as he has done 5 day weeks for the last few.

Well we are 2 weeks into the new look already. I see there's some new ident variants.

As a UTV viewer - it's difficult to hear a robotic recorded voiceover these days. It has completely lost all of its charm now. You can just sense it.

The sooner it becomes itv fully the better. Now there are Northern Irish announcers on the network - I suspect it's on the cards anyway.

This version of UTV we have right now is just awful. Make it stop.

A brief mention at the end of programmes programme by Paul Clark to say it's UTV's 57th birthday. Plus Julian in vision with the weather!

I see Youview has updated its guide, and UTV HD now has a logo.

Mmmm...having the 'hd' text slightly taller than the 'tv' text looks rather clumsy.

A little bit of the character of the channel has gone. However, it's pretty much like every other UK channel now and I doubt very much that 99.9% of viewers give a stuff about the changes. And generally speaking, the overall presentation of the channel has improved - let down a bit by the poor quality audio on the pre-recorded continuity announcements.

It'll be interesting to see the pace at which the UTV branding is dismantled. The technical set-up at Chiswick - although generally doing a decent job - is clearly a temporary arrangement. There's no ECP graphic capability (normally a 'must have' for any UK TV channel these days, no matter how small) and interestingly, no vision mix/fade functionality available either - all transitions are cuts (the most noticeable difference between UTV and ITV network is that the latter fades to black coming out of idents, UTV always cuts to black). I'm curious as to whether or not January 1st will see the next step in the transition towards full ITV branding.

Also a shame that UTV's current facility on the Ormeau Road has no HD capability - the UTV Live/Weather graphics/titles look terrible on HD. Though what I did find interesting was that in more recent months, the video used as the backdrop for IVC actually looked quite crisp on HD.