[Earlie37]

I might have missed it, but just from the technical point of view - what part of a generic new regions studio (e. g. Midlands Today) is what?

The monolith screen is real and physical, but what are the three walls surrounding the set? Are they all proper videowalls? Are they green screens for AR? If it is the former in every region then it is rather cool for regional sets to have this amount of proper videowalls.

All of it is there - you would see the exact same thing if you were stood in the studio. The 'monolith' and the walls of the set are high-density LED panels. If you browse the BBC Breakfast thread, you can see that they are constructed of lots of smaller, square panels which you can connect into various shapes within a metal frame. As has been mentioned elsewhere, these panels draw huge amounts of electricity. Therefore, every studio will also require considerable upgrades to give adequate power. As the camera angles in Birmingham have to be rather tight, you can sometimes see a moire effect which gives away the fact that these are LED screens. Nottingham tend to have this less as they have more breathing room in the studio so they can pull back or use wider angles to reduce any the problem on their screens. With the size of Birmingham's set, their cameras are probably almost as close to the far wall as they can physically go.

You may have noticed that the screens are also provided with a generic set of display templates so the regions can simply insert images / video feeds onto the panels that will animate and fit within the background imagery. Therefore, expect most regions to have very similar animations and templates going forward after their set is updated to this design (e.g. the date at the top of the show, video feed as they turn to the side, the red horizontal bar wipe for a wide background change etc). If you watch East Mids, then West Mids, you can see that even though the images are different, the positioning of particular images, feeds and animations are essentially the same.

This is the same LED hardware used in Studio B at Broadcasting House but on a much smaller scale. A lot of people thought that AR was being used in Studio B when they first saw it but it is also formed of LED panels with a high density resolution.