[Bennyboy84]

Was it just me who checked Channel 5 to see if they had gone into DR mode when Channel 4 went off yesterday?   Also checked the other C4 channels…

Well if i had have seen the breakdown happen I'd probably have done the same, just in case we were witnessing a repeat of THAT Saturday evening.

[BlueFrog]

Only the best Saturday night schedule on telly.

[Stooky Bill]

British Stuff TV were kind enough to capture it. Kudos to Channel 4 for bucking the trend and still giving the opportunity for pre-recorded shows to fall off air...

youtu.be 

Interesting when I was watching this "live" on Channel 4 (not +1) the random frozen frames that appeared to be from ads were entirely different for me than that are captured on this video...

Presumably the video capture was from one region and you were watching a different one so seeing different adverts... well the frozen frames of different adverts!

[Steve in Pudsey]

Thing is that it's sometimes not possible to instantly put up a breakdown caption. Sometimes when things go wrong it doesn't matter how many people are present if the technology's against you. 

Also in events like this there's a certain amount of reaction time and even longer time to assess what is going on

As for a lack of announcer, the audio during  breakdown slide was totally corrupt so I think even if there was one he/she would have had trouble talking on air

I get that sometimes there will be a catastrophic failure, but isn't there usually an emergency cut or router cut to get a dedicated source with the apology caption on air quickly even if the rest of the suite has died?

[Brekkie]

I thought they had a hot DR in Salford now.

Perhaps not staffed in daytime, or the fault was inherent in the file they were playing or indeed the schedule and affected both playout centres.

They surely wouldn't instantly switch to DR though in the event of a breakdown - isn't that just there if they can't get things back up and running at the main network? 

These things always feel longer than they are when they unfold live but they went from losing Countdown to the "Programmes follow shortly" caption within a minute and were back with the show within 13 minutes, so although I'm sure they'd have liked the breakdown to be 10 minutes shorter compared to recent catastophes not all bad.   And they may have lost some ad revenue in the process but were back on track by 3.05pm - might have been even sooner if they hadn't rewound Countdown quite as far back as at least one round was repeated.

[Stooky Bill]

If its the same sort of thing Red Bee provide for the BBC it's not a 'hot spare' or a 'DR' but a dual site setup.

It's still not 100% resiliant, nothing is. There's still potential for things to go wrong, for example there had to be a system to switch between sites. Also having two sites enables you to do maintenance on one while the other runs by itself. What if site A is having work done and site B has a failure?

---

Thing is that it's sometimes not possible to instantly put up a breakdown caption. Sometimes when things go wrong it doesn't matter how many people are present if the technology's against you. 

Also in events like this there's a certain amount of reaction time and even longer time to assess what is going on

As for a lack of announcer, the audio during  breakdown slide was totally corrupt so I think even if there was one he/she would have had trouble talking on air

I get that sometimes there will be a catastrophic failure, but isn't there usually an emergency cut or router cut to get a dedicated source with the apology caption on air quickly even if the rest of the suite has died?

Depends how it's been designed. With new systems like playout there's usually always one scenario or set of circumstances that wasn't foreseen. But when that does arise lessons are learnt and change are made either to the software, hardware or working practises 

Also of course there's some circumstances where having an emergency cut or similar isn't going to be the answer, if power was lost to the suite or even worse the whole building. Yes of course things are backed up with UPS or dual supplies but it does happen