back in the 1980s the difference in daylight saving dates between NSW and VIC was problematic for national/live programs:
Although the one network that TV Week should have asked is SBS. Back then SBS0/28 in Melbourne was just a direct relay from SBS0/28 in Sydney. As far as I was aware they weren’t split feeds at all. Be interesting to know what SBS did to get around that situation.
Source: TV Week
That one was probably from 1982? From the information I can gather online, Daylight Saving ended in NSW on April 4 that year, the first and only time DST ended on the first weekend of April in the state until 2008 when the current first weekend of October > first weekend of April duration for DST was adopted in all states (excluding the WA trial, which aside from a December 3 start in 2006, followed the old last weekend of October > last weekend of March duration the other non-Tasmania states ran with between 1995-96 and 2006-07).
On the flipside, Victoria had a later end to DST than NSW in 1990 and 1995. One would imagine that in those instances, nationally broadcast content produced in Sydney would’ve been done an hour early for Melbourne over those 2-3 weeks.
Before playout was centralised (BCM, French’s Forest etc) who was responsible for playing out non-live material that was being networked, or part-networked - eg. Home and Away that all Seven stations showed at 7pm, or Neighbours that all Ten stations saw at 6.30. As H&A was a Sydney show, did ATN7 hold the tapes play it out for everyone? Did ATV10 play out Neighbours? (I assume states on delay recorded shows and played them back, or delayed the feed somehow). Or was one station (eg ATN, TCN, or TEN respectively) generally responsible for playing out the tapes of all networked content, regardless of where it was produced or sourced from - not unlike today, except the clean feeds went to each station who inserted their own pres?
I’m wondering if this “Now on Foxtel Cable” promo slipped through GO! via WIN (or NBN)… Most regional areas would only get them through the regular LCNs via Foxtel Cable for that matter.
Back then, WIN did the playout for GO! nationally, so it would have been inserted at Nine’s request for metro markets, but I don’t think there was a separate regional feed for inserts like that.
Prior to 2012, most regional areas got Austar. Outside of the metro markets, Foxtel was only available in Newcastle, Central Coast, Gold Coast, Canberra & Regional WA.
I think it varied but IIRC Seven, Nine and Ten still had some form of centralised playout in Sydney for programming to be relayed across network channels, but I imagine in many cases each station was still playing some national programming off tape locally.
How did Brisbane (and any other non-DST state) delay programming? I’m guessing now with digital play out it’s as easy as hard drive delay or similar. Was delay of programming done locally on tape or some other means. Always been curious how delayed telecasts worked in the early days of tape and storage!
I would only guess that they received the feed direct from Sydney and just recorded it to tape for delayed playback locally
Agree. I’ve mentioned before that when stereo TV was young TVQ broadcast stereo programs that were direct from Sydney but during daylight savings periods the programs were mono suggesting they didn’t have stereo tape facilities.
I’ve asked similar questions and been advised that nowadays with everything on server, the centralised playout facilities literally play the file/recording out separately for each market.
In the early days of Broadcast Centre Melbourne, Seven used to play everything out in VIC/NSW time and delay the whole thing for delayed markets. Five (possibly six including RQLD) controllers monitored the feed and inserted supers, ads, promos etc in VIC time but obviously viewers in delayed markets didn’t see them until later, though if there was a cock-up they could usually correct/disguise it for the delayed markets. Doing it all in VIC/NSW time and delaying the whole feed saved having to play tapes out more than once. I was surprised to learn this has changed and files are now played out multiple times, but it’s obviously easier and cheaper when everything is played from digital files on a server.
Prior to this was when it was most interesting when the local stations and affiliates had to record programs and play them back half an hour, an hour, three hours later etc. Probably the most challenging for an Adelaide station - “delaying” a program that lasted one hour or more using tapes would mean recording segments of the program and playing them back while still recording the subsequent segments of the same program - I wonder if anything accidentally got played out of sequence?! It would also be very tight recording a 30-minute show to play back immediately.
Ad-breaks on the commercial channels would make this easier of course with natural in and out cues. What about ABC? Did they delay content in other markets by the same method? Imagine delaying a film by 30 minutes which has no natural breaks - they would need at least three VTRs recording bits of the film - record the beginning onto one VTR, then start another VTR recording before stopping VTR1, then start playing back VTR1’s content while recording on VTR3 and stopping VTR2 - and match the duplicated parts of the recordings exactly (using timecode or whatever) and switch sources at exactly the right time hoping for no nasty splat or jump cut! Crazy as it sounds, this is how BBC regions and nations (Scotland, Wales, NI) used to tape-delay content when they were running 30 minutes or so behind London due to an additional regional program being scheduled somewhere during the evening, sometimes at short notice. This task required someone who was pretty skilled and switched on. Thankfully these days the feed can be delayed by other means!
The ABC in Adelaide had a bank of 1” machines- one row of three on top of another, that worked in pairs. One pair would would play, another record, while the other would rewind, cue to start position and wait for replay, all automatically, including the switcher to switch each machine to air as appropriate. The second machine of each pair was a backup. I think NWS has a similar setup, with the tapes recording the vocal cue and electronic cue information to allow the operators to treat programming as if live from TCN.
Interesting stuff. You mention vocal and electronic cues. How were stations advised - particularly during live to air shows - that an ad-break was imminent etc? Were visual cue dots or similar ever placed on the feed? I know that on the ITV network a cue dot normally appeared [often burnt into the tape of the show] exactly one minute before the break or end (on recorded shows) and disappeared exactly five seconds before the opt point, so the ads/promos could be rolled by the local stations from a countdown of five, and the “fade and take” would occur at exactly the right point (usually!).
I don’t think Australia ever used electronic on-screen cue dots like the UK or the US (in the old - old days).
During live programs it was normal for receiving stations to have an “order wire”, just vocal cues from the Director’s assistant to count to the break, and perhaps the Pres Coord counting back out of the break…
For other programs, the Sydney stations had two parallel systems driven off their automation: one would take information embedded in the vertical interval of the signal that would identify the station call letters, and give 10 second countdown into a decoder box at the receiving station - most stations then fed that into a lighted digital countdown display.
The other system was a “stack” display on a TV or computer monitor. This would display the first dozen or so lines of the Sydney station’s automation, in TCN’s case, or a summarised version in 7 & 10’s (i.e without the commercials listed which wasn’t really necessary). The stack would give you details of break and segment durations forthcoming, the VITS decoder would give you the immediate warning of the impending break.
A question, probably for @Si-Co
Why do some of the old UK shows have that little rectangle at the top right corner of the screen, usually with scrolling lines? Some teletext thing?
I assume, from the way you describe it, you’re referring to the “cue dot” that I referred to in my last post. As in this example:
Without repeating too much of what I said above, this “dot” was either generated live by the station playing out a show, or burnt into the tape itself (which is why they would also be seen in exported copies). On ITV and Channel 4, the cue dot was always somewhere in the top right. The intention was to inform the 14 regional companies that an opt point (normally the end of a segment or the very end of the show) was imminent so they would be ready to roll their ads/promos or cut to local presentation. Except in the case of live shows, the stations would already know this info as they would have a “routine sheet/presentation schedule” which showed every “event” of the day and its source, but it assisted the playout staff at each station nonetheless.
Here’s another example, again from ITV, where you see two cue dots:
Why two? Well, one was on the VT to start with, and the other was being added live. But why, you still ask? Well, because in this case the end of the program wasn’t the opt-out point. Something else was being networked after the show (such as a promo or announcement) that all regions were required to screen. The original dot would disappear 5 seconds before the end of the show (a useful cue in itself for the originating station to cut to the announcement/promo) but the second “live” dot would remain on screen until 5 seconds before the end of the announcement/promo - the real opt point and cue for the regions.
You can see what I mean here in this video - a “pub anno” follows the episode of Rainbow (nothing to do with alcohol! - it means “publication announcement” and promoted a book or video that accompanied the program just broadcast). So the other stations wouldn’t opt out until the anno had ended.
Credit: VideotapeFTW - YouTube
The flickering on the dot often got faster as the opt point approached - again probably to keep the regions on their toes.
Channel Four used cue dots like this prior to 1992 because their commercial breaks were played out by the ITV regions, even though there were no regional variations in schedule (except in Wales, who had a totally different fourth channel, S4C). So a dot would appear before each ad break.
The BBC used cue dots too - normally on the top left of the screen - as a cue for VT operators to run promos or programs or to change source. Often a BBC region would put a cue dot on their feed in order to check if they were “in circuit”, ie. whether they were locked onto the network feed from London, or whether they had “soft opted” which allowed them to add their own supers to the national feed, or indeed opt out properly for local news, programs or promos.
You don’t see these dots very often now - partly due to centralised playout and shared idents and presentation across most of ITV, but they are often still used in one form or another during live programs to advise presentation that an ad break is coming up.
If you see a cue dot appear and then disappear during a repeat of an old ITV show, it will mean there was a commercial break in the show that has been cut out. ABC runs them without breaks, of course, and the commercial channels will probably schedule their breaks at different points (you get more ad-breaks per hour in Australia!). Hope this helps!
According to a video by “#Bestestimes Videos/Tech & More”, in Cairns cicra Febuary 2010 WIN’s LCNs were:
8 WIN TV Cairns
80 WIN HD (still showing the rebuilding card)
88 GO! QLD
I am wondering about them in other areas. GO! was a statewide feed at this point, so did the ACT get “GO! NSW” or a separate feed for Canberra?
To this date I’ve STILL been wondering how the ABC managed their 7pm news bulletins from 2001 to 2005 on digital TV, specially if it was 16:9 or not…
4:3 until the relaunch.
QTQ9’s ‘The Stars Always Shine on Nine’, was that 1980 or 1981?
