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March 4, 2006 11:52 AM

UK Television: On ITV, what is the black and white animated bar in the corner?

It comes on about 60 seconds before a commercial break. My wife tells me that it's been there as long as she can remember (I've only lived in the UK for 2 years). She's sure it's to indicate that a commercial break is coming, but can't remember why it is there.

posted by medium format to media & arts (5 comments total)

Your wife is correct. It's been there forever. Because ITV advertising is regional, most ITV stations (eg: Tyne-Tees) need to break out of the network feed to run their own advertisments. The little flashing bar tells them that it's time to hit the button. I can't find you any links though - I'll keep looking.
posted by grahamwell at 12:02 PM on March 4, 2006

You'd think that was something they could hide in the subtext between frames. Isn't that how recorders that drop commercials work?

There's also that pint glass thing you get on satellite telly in pubs to make sure that they don't pirate the feed. I'm not sure how they do that. Different set-top box?
posted by sagwalla at 12:24 PM on March 4, 2006

grahamwell beat me to it, but it's called a cue dot, and it's there to sync the transfer between a single national feed and many regional feeds. Cue Dot.
posted by Leon at 12:56 PM on March 4, 2006

There's also that pint glass thing you get on satellite telly in pubs to make sure that they don't pirate the feed. I'm not sure how they do that. Different set-top box?

It's actually a separate channel sepcifically for commercial clients with the 'pint glass' graphic superimposed on the pictures at point of broadcast. Sky had bandwidth to throw away, they can afford to do things like that!
posted by ascullion at 1:02 PM on March 4, 2006

This cueing technology is actually something that consumes a fair amount of time and money in the TV business, because if you can get it to work right, you can fire/sack entire teams of human shift coverage.

Generally the end viewer should not see the cue signals.

In the US we use DTMF (touch tone) signals carried on extra audio channels. That is to say, in your regular TV program you'll have stereo left and right, and then in audio 3 and 4 we'll add other things like Spanish or cue tones or what not.

In modern digital TV (digital cable, DBS satellite, and ATSC digital TV) the cue trigger data is carried as just another data stream (PID) in the multiplex. I was actually working on this last week. The standard is called ANSI/SCTE 35.

More than you wanted to know, I'm sure!
posted by intermod at 3:40 PM on March 4, 2006