Music Channels

I remember when BBC4 showed the Xmas 1979 TOTPs, and their copy of Wonderful Christmas Time looked pristine, a shame it always looks so **** in the music channels. Clearly gone through several generations of film and videotape in that time and the higher quality copies likely gone missing.

I’m sure some music channels appear to have ripped videos from YouTube et al. There are videos from not even that long ago (past 10 years) that look ropey on certain channels.

The Paul McCartney video has looked crap well before YouTube existed though. In fact I have an ITV Chart Show episode from 1993 where they run that same poor quality copy, so it seems that's all that was available less than 15 years after the song had come out.

It should be remembered though that music videos were initially created for the likes of Top of the Pops to show instead of having to have the artist appear physically in person. The music video as we know it today dates from the mid 1970s (The Beatles and some other 60s bands did some form of what later came to be seen as a "music video"), and this was long before MTV came along. Prior to having TV channels, VJs and music videos as promotional tools, the Paul McCartney song to use the existing example would only be wheeled out in December each year and used as a filler as it were on the chart shows. Plus of course widescreen wasn't a thing then and the common solution to "make" it widescreen in the 21st century was to crop it. I can only presume since the Paul McCartney song looks to be on the same level of crapness on all the networks they can't all have made such a hash of it so it must have been given to them that way years ago.

Of course some songs never had a music video made for them at all - Slade's Christmas hit never had a music video to accompany it, as they were busy doing other things, so for the likes of MTV and friends somebody dug out some TOTP-style studio recording from an archive somewhere and that effectively became the video for it, so that effectively did them a favour by not providing something they created/partook in to be butchered.

BoXmas seems to be having trouble with its logo these days

Yesterday the onscreen logo reverted back to The Box, seems to be 'Box Africa' today...

EDIT: While I was typing this the The Box logo returned but the song title graphics are gone now. Some sort of technical issue going on since yesterday it seems

Not entirely sure of the exact issue, but it affected both Boxmas and Magic when switching to their non-Christmas schedules yesterday at 6am. I believe Magic was supposed to revert to its normal graphics, which it has on the idents and lower thirds, but the DOG and show title remain in the Christmas style.

Boxmas seemed to have a few more issues, originally both channels were graphic-less, then Boxmas managed to get graphics back except for the DOG and show titles. All is okay now though, with the Boxmas DOG and song titles returning this afternoon.


The Box logo you saw was the back-up DOG, they don't have one set up with the Boxmas logo I guess... the same would apply to the Box Africa logo, which they must have accidentally used (I saw the same when the temporary rebrand happened in November and it took a few days to get the Boxmas graphics to appear).

Apologies if I ask, but what is ''Box Africa''? I have never heard of that

I assume this - https://www.digitaltveurope.com/2012/07/04/box-tv-launches-in-africa/

Box Africa is a pan-African music channel owned by the Box Plus Network.

Turn B in Box to a V and you've got a familiar channel!

Had no idea they also launched a channel in Africa!

Do you mean Vox Africa?

Why wouldn't it be?