TV Breakdown Appreciation Thread

You would certainly be wise to do that if it was used for broadcast, but often I am monitoring my own feed, so the flash of blue or red fault message is useful.
I would definitely disable it if, picking an example, it was on a giant screen in front of hundreds of top sportsmen and women and live on primetime BBC1....

Why black not a freeze? Is it just easier to spot?


You might be waiting a while!

Pretty much - particularly when spotting it out the corner of your eye on a monitor stack. (It's also handy when you're keeping an eye out for something springing to life when the signal comes up)

If you’re expecting a reliable feed, I don’t see why you would turn off black. The ingest department at the Brokaw News Center probably has it that was so they can easily spot a fault and they ingest dozens of local NBC feeds and the network feed. Additionally the during the broadcast there were several moments where it faded to black on screen. So if you were relying on that you may not catch it

If I am on site in an uplink truck then I am not monitoring too many sources compared to an MCR.
Therefore the freeze is a better option for incoming feeds that will be used on air.
If there is a sudden problem it is less objectionable and bear in mind that I will be receiving on a small dish, either 2.4m or 1.8m, not the same as the teleports will be using.

As you know, and as everyone will have seen during various breakdowns, the BBC have theirs to freeze on the last image. It's a bit more difficult to spot when they fail but at least it leaves something on screen - I assume that's the reason. There's alarms in the output chain for both freezing and silence and the lack of sound should be enough to alert the playout director. The receivers can be set to alarm if it stops receiving anything too


That said the satellite link from the snooker went down once while it was showing a wide shot of the table. It was on screen for a while... wide shots with low level audio are very common in smoker coverage!

Do those receivers have dual outputs? One with a monitor fault and another that will freeze frame? Or will the alarm be generated by a multiviewers which notices lack of audio or picture?

Telemundo was using translators (as they are a spanish language station). During the Telemundo online stream when the signal broke with the “Ya Regresamos” slide the announcer said “fall as de origen” roughly meaning the breakdown / failure of origins but a quick search it appears it’s mainly used in news and sports when there’s a technical fault.

I’m not sure what the other LA stations did but the major networks let the picture break up for about two minutes before they cut to an anchor. I assume they all were scrambling to come up with something and get their reporter who may have been watching in a media filing room to a camera outside. I imagine this may be the sort of event where the talent needs to be camera ready at any moment but not tied down to a camera as the source may have been deemed reliable. There was a listen in line for producers so they’d know what to remove a super and count down to the end.

They have several physical outputs, but they only differ in the standard they output - HD or SD SDI or ASI.

Any alarms will be generated by whatever kit is set up to alarm. A lot of video processing hardware will detect freezes, lack of video, silence etc and then can feed that back to whatever control system you have. There are also detectors for such things all the way through the TX chain.


If you use a receiver like an 8200 with a control system like BNCS almost all of the controls and statuses are available to that. From there its fairly straight forward to get it to alarm and log events like say, the receiver losing lock.

Brief cock up on ITV earlier. Coming out of Loose Women and into a trailer for the news, Nina was looking down at her desk for a few seconds before a VT clock flashed up and was followed by the 2013 ITV logo for a brief moment before normal service resumed.

You'll probably catch it on +1 shortly if you're interested.

A UKTV Style breakdown from 2001 now which I haven't seen for a long time

The one thing I like about Channel 4 breakdowns from the 2002 refresh is the chance to hear and see the Ident in it's extended length, like here a few weeks before the new look arrived. This example being the trees Ident added in 2004

Breakdown caption from 2:38 onwards

Bit of an interesting problem on the FA Cup Rewind channel - An onscreen display.

(Not really a breakdown as such obviously, more of an oddity)

Lasted about the opening 3 minutes.