BBC Parliament off air

Hardly the most pant-wettingly exciting of news, but BBC Parliament is currently off air, for what I presume is scheduled downtime of the Millbank studios.

They're currently broadcasting a 4:3 frame of a darkened London skyline (you can just about make out the clock tower of the houses of parliament) with a slightly dodgy "BBC Parliament will return at 06.00" caption, which reminds me of the captions generated by my old Pace satellite reciever's VideoCrypt decoder. Oh, and along with a tone.

The web stream just has the tones and no pictures

This happened last year - it's quite "fun" to keep it on overnight and see the sunset over London in the early hours of the morning. The content is better than BBC Parliament itself.

Are you sure about that?

Yes, London do it differently to the rest of the world.

Here is a cap of the current scene. The sunrise over London sounds fab, but it's a shame that us Freeviewers only get a 1/4 screen of it.

http://tvforum.ath.cx:8080/tvftemp/parliament.jpg

Shame the sun's not coming up until 6.48am tomorrow morning..
http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/5day.shtml?id=1769

The sun doesn't suddenly pop up at 6.48! It's just nice seeing it get at least a bit lighter overnight.

And a 4:3 cut-out, as Big Ben is missing off the side on the 4:3 cut.

I wonder what set of circumstances would cause it to be easier for them to show a skyline and a dodgy caption, rather than something generated at TVC put out through the transmission chain (by a high spec caption generator). Not that I'm complaining..Just interested

But BBC Parliament isn't transmitted via TVC, is it? It's all contracted out to Millbank Studios AFAIK

Whilst that's true, I'd have thought for muxing etc it must go back to TVC ?