Broadcasting House, Salford Quays & TVC

Plus the trams start running there very soon as well.

I used to work in the Quays and prefer to work there than either centre of Manchester or even London (if that is allowed to be said!)

The modern apartments, the Lowry Centre, the shopping mall, Imperial War Museum of the North, the canals - it's the best and very picturesque as well (sick of seeing backdrop of London!)

I must've picked up a random one that stopped for me last December then....
(I'm sure you just mean there are more stops now)


I was admiring the apartments being built while I was waiting for a tram (all of 10 mins)....

My journey then to Manchester (Piccadilly Gardens) from Salford Quays showed me quite a changed landscape. I have to admit to being enthralled by the regeneration in the two cities, and having a tinge of embarsassment for not having visited for so long: I think I missed out on seeing all that happening!

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Nope I meant the new link to Media City! The Eccles line has been open for a long while now.

My main issue with CBBC's Salford move is that a lot of their programmes are already made outside of London anyway, but they go out of their way to make them look like they're shot in London!

Take for instance the Sarah Jane Adventures, the Doctor Who spinoff. Shot on location in Cardiff, even the house where Sarah Jane lives is in Cardiff... yet the cast are all Londoners and in the programme they say the house is in London. Why is that necessary? Why didn't they just write it so that Sarah Jane lives in Cardiff, or anywhere else other than London for that matter?

'Tracy Beaker', another of CBBC's big shows, shot in Newcastle, but the lead characters are from London, and they pretend the orphanage is in... London!

And as an aside, both the new presenters are from London. One of them is even CALLED London.

The BBC didn't need to move whole departments to Salford; it would be a lot less London-centric if it just stopped pretending that dramas shot in the North are shot in London.

I think if you asked all the license payers, "would you rather the BBC spend upwards of £900million moving departments to Salford to the detriment to the quality of output and with a majority of childen's programmes continuing to pretend they're based in London, OR reduce the cost of the license fee by a few quid", I'm sure I know what the public would choose.

Couldn't the technical quality of output get better, since it will be a new studio and can be all 1080p50 capable* (like TVC6 should be at the end of the month*). If they shoot in HD shouldn't that mean even SD broadcasts will look better, like better keying on the weather on news24. Will all the new studios be bigger than the ones they are replacing?

Though for full HD 3D@1080p50 per eye, 3G isn't enough I think because you'd really need double that (dual link?) for uncompressed stereoscopic 3D.

I think that's pretty much irrelevant. Breakfast would have been moving to a new studio - which no doubt will be HD - in Broadcasting House, now it will be moving to a new studio - which will no doubt be HD - in Salford. Not sure of your point.

My understanding is that the basement studio pictured is a replacement for the current main block studio - and would presumably be used to house Newsnight, The Politics Show, The Andrew Marr Show etc.

However, AIUI Newsround and Breakfast are moving to Salford, and Working Lunch has been axed. This leaves that studio a lot emptier than previously... Who knows what it will be used for the rest of the time - or whether the whole studio allocation in W1 will be re-jigged.

As for 1080p50 production - any new studio being built these days will almost certainly have a 3G capable router for future-proofing sake (DB broadcast have, I believe, been selected as system integrators for W1 and will be installing a 3G capable infrastructure where cost-effective to do so) - though whether a 1080p50 vision mixer and CCUs with 1080p50 outputs are installed is another matter.

3G is arguably more important for dual 1080i25 (aka 1080/50i) routing for 3D production - as there is no clear mandate for 1080p50 broadcast to the home (none of the current DVB standards - even S2 or T2 - include support for a 1080p50 capable H264 profile)

I don't think anyone is currently using 2 x 1080p50 for 3D production - 3G is tricky enough to handle and still pretty cutting edge (and some set-ups are using 2 x 1.5G kit still).

All of the 3D transmission systems currently in use are either 2x 960x1080i25 (aka side-by-side - which is what Sky are using), or even 2 x 1920x1080i25 (or 2x1440x1080i25) if the new H264 MVC profile (which sends one eye conventionally and the other eye as a compressed 'difference' signal) is used (as 3D Blu-ray also supports at 2 x 1920x1080p24)

I'd suggest that 3D News is a way off though - whilst manufacturers are pushing 3D displays, there is not a huge amount of evidence that the market particularly wants them. If glasses-free screens appear (without the horrible limitations of current glasses free tech - like having to keep your head completely still) then that MIGHT change - but I really see 3D as pretty well aimed at sport and movies for quite a while to come.

Do you think the six will come from such a studio, a la TC7? What's the likeliness of the 1 o'clock news coming from there too?

Or are we being treated to a dedicated National News studio again? Doubt that...

It seems like News are putting a hell of a lot of eggs in one basket - at least at TV Centre the three news studios are in separate areas of the building, so when N6 and N8 lost power they could continue in TC7, when they had a fire alarm in N6 World could continue. But the replacements for each of these areas are to be in the same bit of the Egton Wing of BH?

I wonder whether they'll be keeping a studio at TV Centre for emergency use which might look a bit less makeshift than Millbank?

How do you know they haven't all got separate power supplies or something similar?

Separate power supplies would solve the problem of a power cut. However, if there was some other incident that rendered that part of the building unusable they'd need a contingency elsewhere surely? (they do have Millbank though I suppose).

Not an expert - but thought the new BBC News operation wasn't in the Egton wing (which currently houses three TV studios already) but in the new bit at the back of BH - they dug out the air raid shelter under BH to build the basement TV studio?

I don't know how close the various studios are - and the fact that they also have studios in Egton may be part of any business continuity plan, along with Millbank.



I wouldn't bank on any plans based on TVC being formulated - I don't think the BBC expect to continue to own that site long-term.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-11235963

I guess this is no big surprise at all, but the Oxford Rd site has gone up for sale this week officially. My money is on the University getting the land, if you know the area.