TV ARK: Returns Jan 2020

It's just great to have it back! I'm grateful to all the team for their hard work and I really like the design and functionality of the new site.

I hope that at some point they look to organise the Sport section a bit better (more like the way it used to be) - it's all sorted (presumably automatically) into alphabetised sub-pages at the moment, whereas it would be better for it to be by category, as it was before (BBC, ITV, etc)

It was the odd pages in between the commercial ones up in the 600s in Channel 4 that I used to search out , there was always a page showing the queues of pages being sent to the transmitters in there somewhere.


Authenticity is all very well but the articles aren't good enough for me to want to wait a minute or so for the next page.

The wait was a limitation of the now obsolete technology, and it was overcome in some modern sets by caching all the pages when transmitted. I lived in a house with one of these, the sub pages it had stored were and listed at the top

Loving the new BBC News clips.

I see they have a video of the YTV start up from Christmas Day 1990 too, but it's missing the first few seconds, but I personally have a complete copy of it! Probably one of the pieces of continuity I'm most familiar with as it's on a video I watched repeatedly as a kid.

I wouldn't be surprised if this was simply down to the videos not being encoded with the 'web optimised' option/MP4 fast start (placing the MP4 container header at the start of the file). Too late now as every file would have to be re-encoded.


Despite that, I'm absolutely loving the site so far. As mentioned, clean source videos of idents is another advantage of the Ark, there's even some 16:9 clips of the ITV 1999 heart idents.

I'll admit I'm one of those who've been frustrated waiting so long, but it's fair to say the wait has definitely been worth it.

Some odd decisions in the indexing of some sections with both sport and regional programmes using an A-Z rather than indexing by sport/event and by region.


I maybe misremembering the old site but there seems to be less curation too - just tiles of clips rather than a bit of info alongside them.

These are cosmetics things, I dare say changing something in the site setup or the database would magically put a bunch of clips into a new category at the drop of a hat.

Some pages on the old site didn't have a lot of information on them, just a wall of clips. Which is sometimes all very well but these days one has to consider mobile devices which you wouldn't have had to do back in the day, considering all they did was text and call and run out of juice after two days.

True - just takes some finding for some stuff, and there is a huge amount of content there which is appreciated. Could do with a section for breakfast TV - I still can't find where they've categorised TV-am and GMTV, only finding the content through the search.

Having had a browse round tonight still don't think the Central News theme of 1998 will ever be beaten - 22 years later it still looks and sounds great. Bloody Carlton!

Click on "Branding", then "ITV", then "ITV Breakfast". Same place it was on the old site I believe.

Suspect the TV-am blurb has been pasted from Wikipedia though and is just one long block of text at the moment.

The Branding section didn't exist on the old site - the ITV section could be reached directly from the front page. But yes, it's otherwise in the same place as on the old site: ITV > ITV Breakfast > TV-am / GMTV / Daybreak / Good Morning Britain

The info is still there. Click on the i to the left of the picture.

Yes the content is organised differently on the new version. Before the main menu was divided up into broadcasters and then each of them had sections for 'branding' 'continuity' 'news' etc.

Now it's the other way round. Not sure which I prefer, there's no right or wrong way to do it. One consequence though is that there is less of a distinction between branding and continuity