Having looked at the footage again this morning, it seems more than likely it was a loss of feed from somewhere, the 'advert' still had the score in the top left hand corner, and then a matter of seconds later, the screen goes blank before cutting back to the standard def format

Looks like (based on time) the engineer scrambled to the desk, hit the stop button or whatever for the 'ad' and it went to a black screen before going back to the game.

One of those things.... it aint a prefect world and s*** happens.

I don't thnink in all honesty that the Beeb would have done any better, or any quicker

Thats right- it was just before an England game in Euro 2000. I seem to remember it being said they'd used Pebble Mill (as it then was) to take control of BBC 1 (they're certainly was continuity before the coverage started) but putting the feed straight to air would be easier for the BBC- but still risky.

Putting feeds straight to air does sometimes happen in radio- particularly to allow for opts in/out.

1-1 was a fair result.

Disconnecting a cable wouldn't have caused a sponsorship bumper to play earlier than it otherwise should have done so.

Mucking about with the transport stream post-encode would have resulted in picture disturbance (there wasn't any) and would also have needed equipment and facilities almost certainly not in place at Chiswick anyway.

It wasn't a loss of the feed. The advert didn't have the game score caption on- the only one on it was the one that was part of the sponsorship bumper. (Sometimes score captions are added in a studio back at base, but in this case they would have been part of the feed arriving back from SA.) The bumper and ITV 1 HD ident were run, and then the screen went blank- would would be explained (as has been said) by the playout system then expecting to take the ads from the SD playout system- except it, quite rightly, wasn't playing any at the time! The engineer then realised there was a problem (wether his fault or not) and put the SD feed to air as the quickest solution.

As has been said, no playout system would have programmed into it 'in event of loss of feed, play ads'. More automatic systems would go to an apology caption and start sounding an alarm to alert an engineer. ITVs would be being watched more closely. Had the feed gone they would have cut to a backup (probably still HD) feed.

Did you not notice that the 'score' had a large Hyundai logo where the ITV Sport logo would have been, and was reporting 'BRA 1 ARG 1' - two teams which were not even playing? That was part of the bumper, those weren't ITV graphics and not from the game.

No loss of feed. Scheduled material playing too early - no question.

So what do you think ITV and Technicolor should do now?

Actually, the ITV Sport logo and score in the top left were being added in London*. We had a clean-feed recording happening at the same time fed to us by ITV as a recording of ITV1 HD. The clean-feed had the FIFA wipes and the host broadcaster supplied lower-third scores, but not the ITV Sport scores in the top left.

* It's possible that the ITV graphics were added in South Africa, in which case ITV had two feeds from S Africa, one containing their graphics and one clean of the ITV graphics.

At the end of the day ITV should be asshamed of themselves.
At the end of the day ITV is the countrys NO 2 broadcaster not a small low budget station.

They make millions and should get it right frist time.
They tried to cut costs insetad of cutting costs at its well over staffed sales office, the farmed out transmission from local stations then Leeds and London to a 3rd party.

If they had run a lean sales department instead of paying expensies to sales and sales support staff to lunch clients but in some cases its "friends", they took transmission away from South Bank,

I don't buy the conspiracy theory at all. I think the more likely explanation is that it was a total accident caused by somebody getting excited. Thus the timing.

Thats certainly the way the BBC have it set up- one incoming with BBC graphics (replacing the FIFA ones) and one clean. When I saw the clean it was SD, but not sure what it arrived in London as.

Put systems and procedures in place to guard against those problems (yes, again) and maybe employ a few more TX and engineering staff (of course I would say that, wouldn't I) so that they're not running so close to breaking point, meaning that errors get caught in good time and ahead of TX. Or maybe, just maybe, decide that transmission is a core service - it's the most important thing about being a broadcaster - and it's too important to be contracted out to some third party who gave you the lowest possible quote...

It might add a few people to headcount, and that might cost money, but it's nothing compared to the catastrophic loss of reputation. People will already be talking about this for the next 10 years - it'll take a long time for their reputation to be restored. Both for ITV and Technicolor.

It's important to emphasise that ITV Sport did their jobs and this failure is not theirs - it's a failure by ITV itself and their chosen outsourced transmission provider. It's a shame that most people probably won't appreciate the difference.

Alternatively ITV might just turn around and say "Sport is too expensive to buy and too costly to broadcast properly" and just give up on sports broadcasting entirely. I'm not saying that's a good option, but unfortunately those are the kind of 'pragmatic' decisions that modern management types tend to take these days. "Can't win, don't try."

The problem didn't seem to be connected to the football though as there is no proof of any issue with the feed, the ads seemingly could have cut in just as the winner of Britain's Got Talent was being announced on ITV1 HD, but obviously didn't.

Good points- I think they'll still do sport, its commercially very attractive.

There were some serious questions asked of Red Bee by the BBC after Euro 2008- although the loss of the feed during the semi final wasn't the BBCs fault (because of the major power problems at the IBC)- the way Red Bee handled it was. It took them over 90 seconds to cut away from a frozen and unstable picture to an apology caption and then a good while longer to make an apology and put Five Live on air. It also took them a long time to get the backup feed on air. (It may have been the BBCs fault as to what their backup procedures for the feed were.)

They seem to have improved though- when 'The Big Questions' was falling off air Red Bee were very quick in getting the apology caption up- but also of cutting back when the incoming feed stabalised- although ultimately it was too unreliable to broadcast so they went to a backup programme.

But is that not just a by product of a live transmission? if something goes wrong, it's transmitted instantly, it will always take a few seconds for a back up to cut in, and in those few moments picture will be lost, was a million to one chance that last night England scored, had the BBC being showing the same game, and had the same 'fault/error' whatever, the result would have been the same.

The job I work in, has a state of the art back up, but if the power dips, or there is a failure, although the backup kicks in straight away, there is a 20 to 30 seconds where we are left in limbo whilst it all runs up to speed, even though it's 'instantanous'

Let's just hope they get todays games in HD.

It's worth mentioning that BBC HD had a technical fault meaning they showed the first 60 seconds of the second half of this game right now in SD (ALG vs SVN), but they very quickly got it back in HD.

There was a noticeable 500ms flicker in the picture and then a 500ms repeat of what we just saw in HD, so that gives an insight into the SD/HD delay i guess.

Hyundai sponsorship = advert - no?

My heart bleeds for ITV......

The customer experience should be preserved at all cost. The worse that should have happened is that HD flickered within a second to SD. All else is inexcusable.

Looks like a problem in London to me- something in the transmission chain fell over and the quickly (10 seconds- good going) put the SD feed into the encoder. If it had been the feed the sound being sent to the encoder would have still been 5.1- it was 2.0. Took them 3 minutes to get back to the HD feed- resetting whatever had gone wrong. So not bad at all, very good infact.

oh dear , you do know who was playing

see here

http://www.epltalk.com/itv-hd-viewer...jor-flub/20822

,and note score in the left hand

You've clearly never worked in any sort of transmission area then- it takes 10-15 seconds to find the right screen and override whatever system is normally in place. ITV last night (and the BBC with their fault today) did quite well in getting some pictures back that quickly. The timing was unfortunate. Whatever caused the break bumper to play is what should be addressed. The response of those on duty was excellent and should be praised.

There should be some sort of rule enforced now because it's not the first time it's happend. Maybe anytime a broadcaster misses a goal it should be hit with a £5m fine or something. If they can prove it's a wider issue (other countries were affected by the same fault) then fair enough. However obviously they weren't last night

I don't think that the BBC would have had the same fault (their not being a commercial broadcaster, for one). Moreover, the fault was not with a loss of transmission. The transmission stayed contstant - however an alternate source was mistakenly broadcast. It is not the same as a satellite feed being lost or a cable being physically cut, or even a relay being rebooted.

I work in telecoms, but I have a degree in broadcast media, and for both, I have never seen more than a second of delay between a primary and a backup source (a power cut is different, if a generator needs to kick in and may give a 30-60 sec delay).

So to broadcast SD when a switch to HD would have taken 500ms is, on a HD channel, inexcusable.

I don't know why or how the ad was shown but it to me looks more like human error than an automated one. I doubt that ITV will ever explain it fully.

In the perfect world maybe, but not in the real world, will never happen.

Anyway you would still have 'missed' the goal, or possibly just as it reached the back of the net!

HD 6 or 7 seconds behind SD running 'live', cut back to SD, say in 2 seconds (prefect world) so that is almost 10 seconds....... missed it! DOH!

As others have said it was just bad luck nothing more

It doesn't take 500ms to override an automated system and get a backup source to air- whatever has caused it to go wrong. It takes about as long as it took last night.