I remember getting up early to watch the ABC TV commence programming for the day with the kids programming at 6. They would start around 5:50 with a few songs “This Old Man” etc… and a test pattern. That was late 80’s.
Yep, Southern Cross Tas used to have it as the Seven feed and WIN used to have the Nine feed run overnight complete with the Melbourne ads. On days like Easter Sunday and Christmas Day it would be allowed to run even longer so it could be 9am before the “switch” occurred again. I remember seeing it on Southern Cross even up to late 90’s.
Thanks - interesting to know that happened. Many ITV regions in the UK used to do something similar, but the overnight “network feed” (normally from one of the larger stations) often took on a brand of its own (e.g. Night Time) so viewers didn’t see a distant company’s idents or presentation.
Surprised that the brand-conscious WIN had no qualms about Nine idents and promos running overnight, but I guess very few people were watching.
I presume there were different legalities/arrangements regarding overnight advertising, and the advertisers paid for a spot that would be seen across multiple markets. Again, making a comparison to ITV, the local stations often used automation to insert their own ad breaks into the overnight feed, and I think this feed bypassed the originating company’s own pres gallery so it contained break-filler “back soon” captions rather than being a purely dirty/off-air feed.
Alan, you mention a “transition” when the regional company took back control. Was there a noticeable on-screen “glitch” or anything, or do you just mean the sudden return of local branding/watermarks?
Used to happen to Melbourne too. Melbourne would get Sydney ads overnight. Channel 10 in particular did this (and it was evident that 10 Sydney used a different PRG to Melbourne at the time) but pretty sure 7 and 9 did similar. This was around late 1980s or early 90s.
I can recall that NBN, TVQ & BTQ took the Sydney feeds from midnight to dawn in the late 80’s/90’s. Saw many a Sydney news promo, Doors Plus & Nobby Kitchens Sydney in that time. QTQ never did as this was the time they broadcast local adverts such as Careton Upholstery & many many Ribbett’s adverts!
Depended on each network. Most was just the sudden return. And normally dead on the hour (sunshine were good with this, where the adbreak in the lead up to the ident would be seven material and then the ident would be for sunshine). WINs timing would be out and sometimes meant their ident or adbreak would crash in on top and not be so smooth.
I guess it probably came down to play out systems at the time and what people who operated these cared about the presentation that went to air.
Prime in Canberra were terrible in the mornings transitioning out of ATN. You would regularly see the Seven ID start for a few frames before crashing in to the Prime ID.
Neighbours had of course been dropped by Seven at the end of 1985 and picked up by Ten in the other metro markets. So quite amusing to see it still being shown on Seven in Perth.
I think TVW7’s schedule was pretty much aligned with the rest of the Seven network by this point, at least in prime time, so what were they dropping or time shifting to show Neighbours at 7pm? (Although on saying that, the flagship soaps like ACP and S&D were scheduled locally across the metro stations so perhaps they weren’t that closely aligned after all).
I wonder if TVW were showing the same episodes of Neighbours as the Ten stations, or if they were behind? I know a lot of the regionals were well behind with shows like H&A and Neighbours even in the 90s. H&A began in 1988 so did TVW show both soapies for a few months until NEW10 launched?
Prisoner was always on STW9 in Perth until NEW10 began repeats.
It’s easy to forget how late Perth, for a metro market, got their third commercial channel, which led to interesting scheduling on the other two channels.
Southern Cross Tasmania continued doing the late night/early morning “switch” to Seven Melbourne right up until around 2011-12. I remember they even used to occasionally switch to the Seven Brisbane feed on Good Friday because Melbourne obviously had the different feed with the GFA running on this day. The metro “switch” used to be done at around 2am most nights (slightly earlier on Friday’s and the weekend). You could always tell when they “switched” over as slight glitches occurred and the feed skipped ahead a few seconds then the metro watermark appeared.
It was rather interesting to see all the Seven Melbourne promos/presentation elements and ads ‘come through’ back in the day I must admit. Unfortunately though they normally ‘took over’ again most times at 6am that morning.
WIN did the same thing, too. In the early 90s they “switched” feeds to Nine Melbourne bang on 12am without fail and again returned at 6-7am. Interestingly though, in the early 2000s for some reason they “switched” to WIN Victoria instead for the late night/early morning handover.
TDT Ten also used to handover to Ten Melbourne in the late night/early morning “switch” at around 2am most nights. TDT was quite different to the other channels however, as they used to quite regularly “switch” between the Melboune and Sydney feeds on weekends due to Southern Cross having the live coverage of the dual AFL coverage being delayed on TDT (for example switching to the Melbourne feed on Saturday arvos as Ten Melbourne had the coverage delayed and then switching to Ten Sydney for Saturday night movies and docos as they had the delayed coverage instead).
They also used to “switch” at 4pm every weekday afternoon during children’s shows complete with ads also for some reason.
Was interesting times indeed that sadly doesn’t happen anymore which is shame.
As a matter of interest, who would have been responsible for making the switch? Would the affiliate have two feeds coming in from the metro station - one dirty/off-air and one clean - and switch between them? Or was it the responsibility of the metro station to control what went out to affiliates, dirtying the feed by routing it through its own gallery/MCR as required? I suppose that is complicated as different affiliates had different requirements.
Going back to the days when playout wasn’t generally centralised, would a dual-affiliated station (or stations like TVW7) generally have access to different feeds to record programmes “down the line” or would they be sent tapes? I assume the independent non-aggregated stations still had access to network feeds for simulcasting things like live news and sport from a metro station).
I remember reading on watvhistory.com that TVW7 had a dedicated VT operator who would record the clean network feed from Sydney onto tape. They would then play it back two or three hours later depending on the time of year. I think this arrangement continued until the late 1990s or early 2000s.
Interesting. That was one way of handing time shifting due to the time zone difference. I assume they handled all time shifting in the same way, by remotely recording the programme from the clean feed. As for the few Ten programmes they showed, these may have been supplied on tape as I doubt they would have a full time Ten Sydney feed. I may be wrong of course.
If Adelaide did the same as Perth they would have to be mega-quick and on the ball with only a half hour delay.
Because TVW didn’t formally join the network until 1988 it is unlikely that they followed much of a networked schedule from the eastern states especially given the situation of carrying some Channel 10 programs as well.
But i think TVW had a half-hour news at 6 supplemented by the local State Affair at 6.30 and then Neighbours (later replaced by Home And Away) at 7.
