At least in the early 2010’s and possibly even further back, channel 7 Melbourne would switch off all or most of their subchannels including 7HD (RACING.COM may have been an exception) between around 2am and 4am or 5am on Thursday mornings. It may have been a different morning before 2012, see below. The other LCNs would be redirected to 7 SD’s stream one by one when their main programs ended around 2am and presumably the reverse would happen in time for their individual programs to start later in the morning. All of this was for testing purposes.
While my TV coped quite well with the switchovers, switching from HD to SD, MPEG4 to MPEG2 etc., Foxtel’s cable tuners for channels like 7MATE (the ones at their headend that picked up the free to air channels for retransmission over cable) would show nothing during this time. Can’t remember if there was an onscreen error message or not.
While I only had a digital TV since late 2012, I saw these same things on Foxtel as far back as one Sunday morning in the summer of 2007, so it may have been happening back then too.
My digital TV (from 2012) would automatically cope with new LCNs or changed transmission parameters (e.g. MPEG4 instead of MPEG2. HID instead of SD, etc.), while someone I know’s TV (similar time period) would need a rescan for new LCNs. Both TVs are well known brands but the other TV was a cheaper model compared to mine.
That was the weekly Disaster Recovery run for Seven when transmission was switched between Melbourne and Sydney with Sydney DR on the air. This also applied in Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and sometimes Perth. Seven kept limited playout capacity in Sydney, first at Epping and then Martin Place in the event 7BCM were to go down for an extended period.
January, 2007, during an episode of one of those air crash shows. Somebody in the news department was editing some footage of an Iraqi attack that somehow got mixed into the on-air audio.
Except it isn’t mostly Nine managed anymore, NPC is a fully owned subsidiary of TXA (TX Australia). TXA bought it about 4-5 years ago, it was going to be fully merged, with both companies to be named the same, but they ended up keeping them separately named with NPC (Nine Play-out Centre) becoming NPC Media & TX Australia becoming TXA Group, the board of TXA Group controls both TXA & NPC.
And who owns TXA, Nine and Seven. Most of the senior managers at NPC are ex Nine with continuity of service from when they worked at Nine. None of the very few Seven staff who went there have continuity of service.
Does anyone know if Ten still do their own playout from Pyrmont anymore?
Despite Ten being much smaller then 7 and 9 it was interesting that it was obviously cost effective for Ten to keep playout in house. Ten also seemed to get the Talent Only Studio going on a wide scale before anyone else had success with it.
Occasionally you see articles in US broadcast journals about Ma and Pa TV stations doing playout from under their house, so it cannot be too hard.
‘Station in a box’ solutions are pretty common and good for small market stations. It always gets trickier the more content sources you have, time delayed stations, local ad replacement, last minute changes, etc.
But certainly you can run a single TV station off a PC with minimal fuss. There’s even free or cheap software that covers all the basics.
The Ma and Pa US stations seem to just run a couple of hundred watts of ATSC from a low site in the town so they can meet the FCC ‘must carry’ requirements to get on the local cable system. Their cable QAM modulator is probably more important than their Tx.
If only TV money could be made so easily nowadays.
Yes, years ago, no to now, there’s been big staffing changes in the last few years at NPC. 7 complained years ago that NPC was loaded towards 9 & that’s why everyone came to the agreement for TXA to buy it, so it would be managed & operated neutrally the same as TXA is transmission wise.
Yes they do.
TEN play-out in Pyrmont is probably more technically advanced that NPC, they totally rebuilt it a couple of years ago, the Pyrmont studios & play-out is fully IP, only changes to ASI when it leaves the Pyrmont building for distribution to the transmitter sites, as some of the transmitters in the Network can’t do IP input yet (too old).
On the Restack Project connecting up old SCADA controls to new Tx’s that had IP interfaces felt a bit like connecting a record turntable to your iPhone. Its obviously going to be a long time until the SCADA control/monitoring can be retired but even back then a 4G router connected to the Tx IP interface would have been far more cost effective than reusing MOSCADs and NFM etc
I don’t mean IP as in controller/monitoring of the TX, I mean IP program input into the exciter, like AoIP in radio & like the old DAB+ transmitters having an ETI input but the new ones now have EDI audio inputs into the exciters.
Though having said that, yes there are still some old transmitters that don’t have IP control still being converted back to the old ways.
Still think Seven should have done similar and moved their playout to BTQ like they did with their archives many years ago. A building that Seven can’t sell, and would have made sense to stay in-house as well and bypassed teaming up with Nine altogether. Ah well, too late now.
One obvious thing that has held back TV is everything is centralised in Sydney, an extremely unaffordable town. TV doesn’t pay high wages and pairing TV and Sydney is not a good combination. So often TV workers relocate to Sydney to get some progression then find they will never be able to get into the property market and end up going home to a non-TV job somewhere.
Put TV playout at Maroochydore or Gold Coast and staffing it would be easy - I vaguely recall there may have been some 7 Presentation related work done nationally at some stage from Maroochydore but it got canned when 7MBC came along?
At one stage about the time of Aggregation they upgraded from a Sony LMS tape playout at Maroochydore to a Grass Valley Server, so perhaps the original SEQ playout was on the LMS then both stations went on the Grass Valley after MVQ arrived. I can’t imagine there would be much tech work left at Maroochydore now with the playout at NPC and BAI doing the transmitters.