Vernon Kay's Gameshow Marathon

Because Vernon had to inform viewers they may have to text their competition entries in

I suppose having it live explains the link up to Zoe Ball in another studio plugging Grease is the Bore on afterwards.

Maybe it was live just to recreate the atmosphere in that Golden Shot was a live programme, the others they've featured weren't.

Grease is the Turd you mean? Or has Officer Crabtree been a bad influence on me once more?

I've watched part of a video recording of last night's Gameshow Marathon - The Golden Shot. On my 4:3 TV the ATV ident looked slighty off centre.

At least it didn't look distorted, unlike in Ant and Dec's edition of The Golden Shot 18 months ago.

Last time around the viewer was miles out giving their directions, and it was mooted on here that this may be down to digital delay (if they were watching it on Sky etc they'd get the picture several seconds below analogue).

I suspect one of the side effects of technological advances is that The Golden Shot would actually be impossible to play in this style again.

Thing is, the delay between analogue and digital BBC1 is under half a second, it's almost like hearing an echo if you have them both on the same time, but ITV (at least Channel TV where i live) is sometimes up to 10 seconds behind, any particular reason why this is?

What was the point of this being live? Not that I'm criticizing - I'm all for live shows as much as possible - but if there was no viewer interaction at the end, then there was no definite need to be live? Couldn't Vernon have said to the home viewer to switch their television set to analogue to play the end game?

Suppose in some parts of the country, that isn't possible any more these days...

Maybe the original reason for being live was indeed for a phone-in game, but somebody involved in making the programme eventually pointed out the potential digital-delay issue, at far too late a stage for the plan to do the whole show live to be changed?

When we're talking about an analogue transmission, we're only talking about the last step of the transmission chain. The signals are digital throughout many other points of the chain, and as such a delay is introduced by encoding/decoding.

ITV do deliberately delay the DSAT feeds because they have so many channels on each transponder, giving each one a slightly different delay helps with statmuxing. Also consider that Channel's dirty feed of Meridian adds extra complexity and extra decoding/reencoding stages to it.

I'm surprised by your observation that DSAT is delayed with respect to analogue on BBC1 CI - Fremont Point is actually fed from a DSAT receiver. I can only assume that their receiver decodes a little more quickly than your own. I'm not sure how Channel's output is fed to Fremont.

Meridian 4:3 off air feed under the sea, isn't it?

Well here we go again with this week's Gameshow Marathon, now on ITV1 (I1). It's Name That Tune tonight.