TV Breakdown Appreciation Thread

No that’s what appears when a local affiliate is supposed to insert local content. It’s there in lieu of a black screen and the chimes are used to get the operators attention. Usually when a master control operator doesn’t play out the ads on time or at all.

With primetime programming master control and traffic operators get neat playlists telling them what company and what ad is running how far into the program. When I’ve seen them I imagine they’re somewhat annoying to who ever has to schedule the playout servers especially when they decide to extend the length of the show to some mundane time such as 8:32PM. It’s beyond me why they just don’t send it out in the time it’s supposed to really air.

But with sports there are naturally “floaters” where ad breaks are not at set times. The network sends out planned commercial break schedules but with out the time into the program - just commercial block A and what ads are played. Unfortunately with sports the planned commercial blocks may be split up so they really have to be on their toes and monitor the urgent messaging system.

Here's how it looks like in Malaysia:

Yeah, I've seen that happen once, at first glance a perfectly managed breakdown with slide put to air quickly and announcer doing their thing brilliantly - all while the reserve was totally fine.

Where I am, if anything is important enough to have extra resilience beyond a single reserve, we'll make the first-resort one available in emergency cut so it'll always be easier to get to than the breakdown slide. For the highest-profile thing I've done I think I had 14 feeds available in total, I didn't have enough tiles to see them all!



When we do American sports over here, we use "floaters" to describe the breaks that could appear at any moment in the running order, things like pitcher changes, additional time out breaks aside from the mandatory TV ones, overtime breaks etc.

In the rundowns we get you can sometimes see how the US breaks are scheduled between network and affiliate, for example 60 seconds of national ads, 90 of local and then back to national for a 30 second promo. As you say, you have to be on your toes, they can sometimes thow these breaks in at the very last moment, take spots from one break to put in another, that sort of thing.

Last Leg falls off air after a circuit booking error. Someone didn’t get the times right, the main circuit booking finishes, Channel 4 pres then takes the reserve circuit just before that feed booking ends too (different test card as different route).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6QQbv7zrkg

A power failure at BT Tower results in both paths from Fountain Studios dropping the X factor just before it went to air. From memory ITV pres ran standby material and all the ad breaks for the hour before eventually getting an SD feed via a permanent circuit into TVC MCR I think? The timings of the show were severely affected because the ad minutage for the hour had already been played. After this a sat truck was booked for each show to add resilience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRwhcIIHxd0

This Morning fell off air last year when both main and reserve circuits failed resulting in 10mins of holding slate before a feed was restored via another route. The video is conspicuously absent from youtube but was covered in lots of newspapers! Philip Schofield returned to air with a camera cable in his hand joking about unplugging things.

IIRC although the two paths to ITV both went through Tower there was a third path by satellite, in SD, which was for Irish TV. The BBC downlinked that and then fed it to ITV via a non tower route

That version being severely abridged, of course. The test cards were on screen for a few seconds more and the breakdown itself was a lot longer. To echo my earlier point about Channel 4's approach to breakdowns, the following week's episode had a little TV on the desk with the first testcard on the screen as a nod to what happened. Anybody else would've tried to brush it under the carpet. I think they were talking about people tweeting in about how much they enjoyed the CA too.

Ok that makes sense, in later years I am led to believe TV3 was fed via a line booking from TLS MCR which I guess would also have dropped in this scenario.

Love stories like this!
So, technically is this the only time the BBC were responsible for getting The X Factor on air?

But, have to ask the question - why couldn't LNN (or Ericsson) downlink the satellite feed themselves and put it to air for ITV?

At various times the back up circuit changed between being satellite from Fountain to ITV via various routes to being a terrestrial microwave link which did the entire series left rigged on the roof, and turned on as required.
It was the terrestrial link when BT Tower went down.
This went into the mast head receivers on the Crystal Palace mast.
The circuits went from there into CAR at TVC.
The problem when BT Tower lost power was getting the signal to ITV's playout at Chiswick.
I think it may have been achieved in a way that shouldn't have been done contractually, so can say no more on that!

Probably not. By this time BBC Resources were regularly working for any broadcaster, and anyway there is a lot of co-operation between the broadcasters.
Back in the late 1980s I had a call from ITN (round the corner from me in LBH as they were in Wells Street) asking if we could sent them sync pulses, as their generators had failed just before the News at Ten.
I had a feed of TVC's sync pulses fed to me and passed it on to them.
It was the only time you didn't get a frame roll switching between the BBC channels and ITV at the time!

AFIAK the Feed the Swiss had wasn't for the EBU, but just for themselves.

Officially every broadcaster had to get it's pictures from the World feed via the IBC. Which is why everybody was confused as to how AlJazeera managed to not loose the picture.

The Swiss I had an extra deal with the UEFA, because they just launched their HD channel and hadn't yet the capacity to mix the IBC feed (which is without any commentary) and all three of their commentators (they have to provide german, french and itallian). So they were allowed to take a direct fiber link from the stadium, with the sound added on location (they had problems with syncing up the feed from the IBC with the commentary, I believe).

ZDF got the Swiss coverage because ZDF's broadcasting centre is also responsible for playing out 3sat (a joint german, swiss and austrian culture channel) and back then instead of paying for renting fibre lines they just grabbed recordings of the air from the Swiss channels which are available via satellite. And for that reason ZDF has one of the encryption cards used for Swiss TV on satellite.
By the way the second video posted by Night Thoughts actually is from the ZDF open air studio, which was located at the Festspielhaus Bregenz (a open air opera house which was also featured in Quantum of Solace).

As to how ORF got the Swiss coverage I don't really know. I think they might also have one of the Swiss cards for programm exchange or they just took the swiss pictures from ZDF (because I know ORF came back later than ZDF).

We used to see that all the time on NHL Gamecenter streams of network weekend games. Looks like the affiliate didn’t cut to their own playout until very late, and then I guess they got one on air late on and it didn’t playout fully in time, then back to network.