The Sport Thread

I see Brian Blessed and raise Murray Walker. (Warning - contains Clarkson)


Meanwhile....

Snooker’s biggest tournaments will continue to be broadcast by Eurosport for the next 10 years after the pan-European channel agreed a new deal with the sport’s governing body.

The decade-long extension, negotiated with World Snooker and IMG, includes live rights to 18 tournaments per season on the World Snooker Tour on its TV channels and online services across Europe, running through to the end of 2025/26.

This includes the showpiece World Championship, currently held at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre, as well as the Masters, UK Championship and Welsh Open, with the European network sharing live coverage of these events in the UK with the BBC until at least 2019.

from ……..

SPORT-ONTHEBOX.COM
29-Apr-2016 @ 17:00

Women's race from Le Tour de Yorkshire wasn't broadcast today due to technical issues with the relay plane.

Also, the graphics look like the Tour De France ones. With French text etc. What's that about? Do vsquared do it as a world feed?

It's gone down again for the main race with the commentators saying it's temporarily going "back to base". For the past few minutes all we have seen is views of the finish line and people waving at the camera. Will be interesting to see what they're going to do for the next half hour or so as it looks like they won't be able to get it back up and running before the finish.

And that was the backup plane from France as well

Eurosport have now ditched coverage and gone to tennis instead. ITV 4 sticking to the race, although showing pictures from yesterdays race and the women's race.

EDIT: ITV4 have now ditched coverage.

If they are the TdF graphics, then that is the France Televisions Sport graphics house style, which would indicate that tv coverage has been contracted out to France Televisions who are producing for the race organizers.

Wow looks like a pretty big single point of failure there! I seem to recall the BBC managing to get coverage of sorts of the London Marathon when fog grounded the helicopter that was providing a midpoint. Did this particular event not pay enough for a plan B?

Shame their Tour de France coverage is usually excellent, but if the plane can't fly I guess that's it!

I remember that occasion as well Steve. Think it was 1989 or 1990. At first, they could only show the leaders at fixed points, and not from the cameras on the motorbikes. David Coleman said engineers were trying to rig something up. They did, and whilst the quality wasn't 100%, it was a lot better than no mobile camera coverage at all.

Snooker coverage just fell off air to a blank screen a few minutes ago. Was expecting the apology caption to make an appearance.

That might risk waking the audience though.

I distinctly remember Coleman saying something to the effect that the engineers were really unhappy at putting out such poor quality pictures but in the circumstances it was better than nothing.