New Meridian, BBC South & South East Thread

There is a setting in YouTube to stretch a video to 16:9, you add yt:stretch=16:9 to the video tags. It is useful when you have captured an anamorphic picture as a 4:3 video. I wasn't suggesting you do that in this case though as it would just end up stretching the picture and making everyone look like a fatso.

Where do you work?

Well spotted ...

Yes, the grey boxes that the video/audio passes through will just come back up straight away. Presumably the vision mixing desk came up quickly with either with the source that it was on before or another studio camera source, and the sound desk came back with whatever was faded up at the time too.

The opt-out system was set to fail safe so that if the output of the centre was lost it would just pass through network, I'm surprised that didn't kick in straight away, although perhaps it's different now it's all backhauled to London.

Has anyone noticed how Meridian seems to favour the eastern half of their region?

We get Meridian East on both ITV 1+1 & ITV1 HD, plus the image on the screen behind the presenters is of the Maidstone bridge in Kent...

Why is this? The western half of the region is much bigger than the eastern half, which basically only covers east Sussex, Kent & a bit of Essex

It's not so much that they're "favouring the east" as such... It's because no Anglia variant (neither the "east" nor "west" sub-region thereof) is yet available on ITV1+1 or ITV1 HD.

So, Meridian East was picked as the "macro-regional" service for the combined Meridian/Anglia areas, as it's in the corner where the two regions meet.

This of course overlooks the fact that the two regions also meet in the Milton Keynes type area! Maybe they're swayed by the fact that Essex is perhaps (?) the most densely populated part of the Anglia region, so have picked the version of Meridian that is closest to those viewers? Plus, Meridian East traditionally sort-of acknowledges the far south of Essex editorially, rightly or wrongly (at least on the weather map, if nothing else, nowadays!).

I hope that if/when an Anglia variant of ITV1+1 and ITV1 HD launches, that Meridian will change to using the "West" sub-region pan-regionally, because, as you rightly say, it's by far the larger of the two Meridian areas.

I think you'll find that, as of those changes a few months back, there's certainly a +1 region for Anglia, although I can't be sure for HD.

It does seem a silly reason to use the east version though, as Meridian east & Anglia don't really "meet" as surely the London region spreads in between the two anyway? Meridian east do still cover news items in southern Essex, with places like Basildon & Southend featuring on quite a regular basis...

I noticed on tonights Meridian Tonight at about 6:20 that something went wrong with the video of the Maidstone Bridge & traffic started driving in reverse at an alarming speed!

During the Dale Farm evictions, crews from ITN (London Tonight) and Anglia were live from there and was also covered on Meridian Tonight.

Southend and Basildon are slap bang in the middle of three regions - at least until the switchover it was common to see all of them (Meridian, Anglia and London) in households. And indeed the region I get depends which room I'm in (long story!)

Tomasz Schafernaker is joining BBC South East Today as weather presenter, apparently ?

https://twitter.com/Polly_Evans/status/208247487671181313

He was on last night's 6.30 bulletin. A lot camper than I remember him being.

BBC South East Today overran tonight, although it could well have been planned. They went straight from the BBC South East Today closing in to The One Show opening titles completely missing the promos and ident that other regions saw.