Prime one the other hand seems to have improved a lot with ad break timing by what I’ve seen lately. Been recording hours of 7mate WA trying to get an ident and nothing from metro has crept through.
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The triggers used to drift by as much as a second, they probably still do.
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Only way to really stop that from happening would be to run a separate feed that runs a black screen in the ad breaks, but networks like to be lazy by running the regionals off dirty feeds to regionals. Short of doing playout from the same location that is, that should solve it too.
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To take Nine branding, they have to source the dirty feed. Nine does have clean feeds with black holes, but they have no branding on them. As such only Imparja would source clean feeds (for now). Very sure the next affiliation contract will force Imparja to take Nine branding.
Even the NBN markets are sourcing metro dirty feeds, and that is from the playout facility in the same building and clipping the metro feeds all the time, is much cheaper to do that. Therefore I would highly suspect if Nine was to move playout of WIN markets, they would do same as NBN markets and have them source the metro dirty feeds still and only cut insert TVC breaks only as MHA does now.
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I could see that.
I could also see the “WIN News” name stay, like with NBN but with the Nine package.
Highly doubtful. If Nine were to continue with 30 minute local news bulletins for regional markets when and if they takeover WIN when old boy Bruce departs, no doubt Nine would rebrand as Nine News Regional again as what occurred during the Southern Cross days with production to resume at the QTQ, ODS, and GTV hubs again. The WIN brand will get axed altogether, thankfully.
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Does anyone know when Nine’s contract with Imparja will expire?
its a good theory but people within 9 have told me they have little interest in taking on WIN TV broadcast infrastructure and the cost of maintaining all those transmitter sites, when they are now already getting 50cents of every dollar WIN sells just for supplying a dirty to the WIN playout centre. yep WIN would love 9 to take over the news division and if they did, jobs would go all over the shop in Canberra and Wollongong. I just can’t see 9 wanting to buy out WIN.
So you can’t see a metro network showing interest in buying a regional affiliate because of the infrastructure costs and the complexities of taking on a regional news operation, while Seven does exactly that and manages to find a way to do it profitably? 
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Ok, then NEC/Nine may as well get rid of NBN and NTD if that is the case?
I don’t believe Nine does not want to buy out WIN eventually and then get 100% of the revenue and still choose to produce local news bulletins like they did for Southern Cross out of existing Nine facilities bypassing WIN Ballarat, WIN Maroochydore and WIN Wollongong facilities altogether. Transmission costs would be outsourced to BA or TXA as will playout be through their TXA/NPCm provider anyway.
Publicly they won’t air their ambitions while Bruce Gordon still owns WIN so as to keep the peace to avoid the debacles of years gone by.
Could the metro stations not insert a “black event” into the feed before the ads run - after the first promo and before the last promo (that the regionals generally take). On metro it would just show as a very quick cut to and from black (which used to happen between every ad in the past) and it would give the affiliate a better chance of opting in and out cleanly.
I reckon the networks would argue that doing it that way would disrupt the flow a bit. Plus, 1 or 2 seconds per break adds up over time. They’d be ultimately sacrificing profitable slots just to fix an issue that, in the end, is the affiliate’s problem not theirs.
One thing Nine does do which sometimes works in WIN’s favour, is they always fade sponsor billboards in and out, where WIN always use a hard cut in and out. So if their timing has drifted a little, you will still see a bit of Nine’s sponsor leak through, but it’s almost faded to or from black. I guess that’s something they could do between all promos and commercials? But it’s still an effort just to bandaid a problem that shouldn’t be a problem to begin with.
As I said earlier, Prime has improved recently with their commercial break timing out of TBS. It’s possible to just get it right to begin with.
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7 West needs to grow revenue.
Nine has Stan. Stan sports. Radio stations. Mast heads
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There’s got to be some way to trigger breaks using a VBI line or something, and not rely on timing.
They do. The trigger drifts.
Why does it drift, and can it be stopped from drifting?
Like all clocks it loses accuracy… and when your talking frame accurate - ie milliseconds - to get the trigger at the bottom of a fade it’s never going to be pretty.
Nine never had triggers until Go! Came along and WIN didn’t want to staff a pres suite, and this was the solution they came up with.
10 always had triggers, and they’re far more adaptable to keeping in time.
(My info is about a decade old now)
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Why can’t they just put the trigger in the playout “playlist” to play exactly in the gap between show and ads? This is how it works in radio which is essentially the same thing.
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unless his daughter takes over when he goes win may live on longer she works at win
Maybe the playout server can’t do it and they have to insert it further down the line.