The X Factor 2018

I don't think there would be any ITV staff at Red Bee. But no doubt the Red Bee tx staff do have a duty list of senior ITV staff to ring in the event it becomes necessary to make a significant editorial decision. That used to be the case when it was all in house and I wouldn't see any reason to change it just because its now outsourced. Just a guess of course on my part.

Curious that only the audio was affected and not the video given that the digits would be so intertwined these days?

ITV/Red Bee would have found themselves in quite the quandry specifically because the show was pre-recorded.

Should there be an audio/visual problem (obviously not the same one, as this was caused by playout of a recorded show rather than anything which happened in the studio) during a live broadcast of one of Cowell's talent shows then you can bring everything to a halt. It gives people time to get things back up and running and get Dermot/Ant and Dec to make a few cheeky jokes, banter with Simon at the desk and get things off and running again.

This is possibly the one instance of pre-recording a show making things more complicated than just doing it live. Because when an error hit, you had these issues at play:
- Most people expect X Factor to be live, it's always been live. It'll have been announced during the week that it's being recorded but not everyone will have paid attention to that. People were just confused when Dermot made no reference to what had happened.
- It's not an option to rewind the tape and replay the performances: there are automation, advertising minutage, other broadcasters (STV and Virgin Media in Ireland) issues to think of.
- If you don't show all the performances then that has major implications for voting in a UK broadcasting system which has had so many scandals over TV voting that it's terrified to even give out text numbers any more.
- Who was playing it out? If it's not Red Bee and it's coming from a feed, then that adds another layer of complication.

In the absence of a good solution, I'm guessing the gameplan was to leave it on air, hope it resolved itself and refer upwards to some bosses who were no doubt at that exact moment trying to work out what to do themselves. At that point they wouldn't have wanted to box themselves into a corner by taking the show off the air. Having said that, I am surprised they got through two songs which went wrong. But as previously pointed out, they'd probably retain more of an audience doing that than taking the show off the air, and if it's coming from an outside source then taking it off probably wouldn't have done much anyway - they were at the mercy of what was being played down the feed.

The fault cleared after a commercial break so presumably they were able to re-establish the circuit or switch to a reserve whilst off air?

For this circumstance it probably would have been better to pull if off air and re-establish the circuit given that what ensued was cancellation of a vote and replanning of the whole Sunday show. But as you say not a decision for Red Bee that.

I would be more inclined to suspect an issue with the device doing the playback rather than circuits.

You would expect the latter to be redundant (especially after a previous failure involving this show) but perhaps not the former if its been a late edit and the hasn't been time to arrange a safety copy (or whatever the digital equivalent is).

Even though it's done as live, presumably they would need to go through and check for compliance and make any necessary edits, as the "pressure of a live show" wouldn't wash with ofcom for a pre recorded show.

There was a satellite feed up around 8pm ish on 28.2e for the show, So it would appear to have been fed as live from LH2.

If they'd hauled it off the air they'd have had a problem one way or another, because they would have interrupted a performance (and presumably couldn't just rewind to the start of the performance again). It would certainly have been a cleaner and more professional way of handling the situation, but I think they'd still have been stuck with replaying all the performances again on the Sunday.

I would second this thought.


For major shows such as The X Factor ITV insist on having more than 2 fully redundant paths to playout, of which satellite would have been one of the backups, and I've no doubt playout would have switched between them before resigning to putting a caption up.

Therefore the issue must have been on all the feeds, which points to an issue at the video server or somewhere between the server and the encoders, playing the show.



Given the late recording and tight turnaround, it's likely that full redundancy hadn't been setup at LH2. In fact it's quite possible that the show was played through the gallery from the server that did the recording. If they had time to transfer it anywhere else, they would have probably transferred it to Red Bee and have them handle it.



It would appear that during the break an engineer fixed the fault (or rebooted everything, which quite often fixes minor faults).

The big complication with stopping the show out of a break is coordinating automation timings with all the external playout centres (Leeds, STV and Virgin Media Ireland). As it has been prerecorded, the ad times had probably already been agreed and put in to automation at all the sites. All you need is one not to be changed correctly and you get an ad break at just the wrong time. Therefore, given that the programme was still mostly watchable, stopping and restarting was probably considered more of a risk than letting it run.

What's really interesting is that this didn't come up anywhere on my social media. First I learnt of it was TV Forum! Part of me does wonder if this was a very clever ploy to get tounges wagging about a show that's already on life support. If my show went from Top Dog to being mullered nearly 3:1 by Strictly of all things, I too would panic.

Would Chiswick or even LH2 not have recorded the final dress rehearsal earlier that day?

Is there an audience (of live show capacity) for the dress rehearsal?

If, no, then that's probably your answer. Switching from one act in front of a full audience, to another in front of an empty performance space would just look plain odd. Even with Dermot explaining the reason why..

Having worked on many programmes for ITV, I can assure you that there are backup paths for most programmes, not just the major ones.
This will have had diverse paths (satellite and fibre probably) if it was played in from anywhere other than Red Bee.
It really doesn't sound like a circuit issue, more a source fault or a common point between two sources which also affected the backup source.
All a guess on my part as I didn't watch it!

I haven't been to ITV playout so I don't know if they work differently, but usually with a live play-in you'd keep all the breaks as manual. I work in an environment where EVS play-ins from outside are a routine, everyday occurrence due to tight turnarounds on edits and even though we'll have frame-accurate timecodes we'll still use the counts over talkback just in case. I know that's also the case elsewhere but as I said, I don't know how ITV and the others taking the feed do it so it might not be universal.

They wouldn't have needed to wait for the break to go to the reserve feed so as others have said, it might be the case that it had the same problem. Also for those wondering why they didn't go to breakdown, again I'm sure it's not the case everywhere, but often clients prefer in many circumstances to stay with pictures if they are good (or even with some faults but watchable) and use an apology caption rather than cut to the breakdown slide. Again, different things in different channels and situations. I'm sure with hindsight the ideal thing would have been to go to breakdown, try to fix the issue and restart from the point prior to the fault (if, and that's a big if, the fault wasn't on the material being played out at source, which might be the case even if good copies have been seen elsewhere) but that's a huge call to make at the time and would've needed the go-ahead from the channel.

Good point. I know with Eurovision the dress rehearsals 24 hours before TX are recorded (both by the host and locally at the various international galleries) and are part of a contingency plan (the official DVD used the dress rehearsal to cover the stage invasion upon the British singer) but if there's not an audience here then that would explain why. I imagine they're struggling to fill LH2 for the main show let alone a dress rehearsal.