[Orry Verducci]

Possibly a quicker reaction than it looks - S4C is played out from a pres suite at BBC Wales, which I assume is a similar spec to BBC Scotland. It looks like their desk takes 2 seconds to react after pressing a button

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Not neccessarily. It depends how the technical fault slate is put to air.

What you see in that video is the playout automation system (Morpheus) taking a few seconds to react to the "take next" command. This is fairly standard. In the playout suite I look after it takes around 2 second, and here it seems very similar. This "pre-roll" delay is very intentional, it gives the automation time to send the commands the relevant devices (in this video an ICE server) and sync up the main and backup copies of the channel so that they both cut in sync with one another.

So if the operator quickly puts the technical fault slate as an event in to the automation playlist and uses the automation to take it to air, then yes it would take a few seconds and the operator has acted very quickly.

However most playout operations assume that in the event of a fault the automation system itself could be at fault, and as such can't be trusted to put the slate to air. So most playout facilities have the fault slate continuously playing on a server on loop, and have a button on a control system somewhere to make a router switch, which changes the outgoing feed from the normal automation controlled source to the server playing the slate. Those switches are usually fairly instant, and to the best of my knowledge that is what the BBC do, so I imagine they've setup S4C the same. In fact on that video you can see the technical fault slate in the top left corner of the multiviewer, ready to go.