What was your favorite regional ITV station growing up?

Indeed regional news was part and parcel of all applications for the new breakfast franchise in 1980. I do remember the BBC really excelling in this, providing proper regional opt outs every half hour for three minutes each or so (except for viewers in London and the South East who had Frank Bough or Selina Scott providing their regional news).

There are (or were) tweets that imply TV-am regional segments were tooted and probably planned, but since the entire operation fell flat on its arse and prompted a full-scale mini relaunch just two months in probably means any plans for it they did have were the first thing to go. They kept the regional studios though, plenty of examples on YouTube where they appear on screen (see their coverage of the 1987 election for example).



As I say above it was probably planned during the TV-am years but it never happened, and of course the only reason it happened at all after 1993 was because it was pretty much expected as the BBC had doing it for years before hand, and I believe looking at some old posts it was a financial agreement from GMTV to allow it to happen, so it was effectively no different from taking a programme from anybody else, had to have something to opt out from after all.

The IBA as it then was had to switch over the transmitter signals between TV-AM and the regions. Did the existence of local news on GMTV mean that transmitter had be reconfigured to create a smoother broadcast setup? By that I mean with 24 hour tv established by 1993 GMTV could switch back and forth with the regions automatically?

Love the last Breakfast time regional news before Christmas from BBC Leeds around 15:30 in this you tube clip ...

https://youtu.be/zDh_ZDuVL4o

A little bit of travel and a local pantomime update .

Technically it was BT who did the switching but anyway... And also by 1993 the IBA had long gone, having been effectively disbanded in 1991 in favour of the ITC.

I believe by 1993 the networking arrangements had changed, and GMTV came out of the London Studios, as did Carlton's output for London weekday, so it probably wasn't really necessary for London to switch transmitter sources, considering it was coming out the same building. I'm sure its been discussed here many times before but I believe the easiest way to do the opt-out for the regions would be just the normal network feed and opt in and out of that. No different to taking any other programme.

Perhaps one other reason why GMTV went for regional news, STV had a stake in GMTV at first. Secondly, the TV-am inject studios were done after the IBA ordered TV-am, in 1984, to beef up its news service. The north east studio was in a now replaced office block near Jesmond Metro station in Newcastle.

I know here in Yorkshire land there were non-sync cuts (we had them at 6 and 9:25 as well) and teletext disappearing during the local opts well into the mid-90s. Might not have been the case in all regions of course.

TV-am regional studios were never designed for local news opts. They were regional news centres with a handful of staff.
In the corner of the office was a down the line camera and little studio for guests or reporters.

I recently posted a recording from Meridian in 1993 where the Carlton ident briefly appears at 9.25 before Meridian’s startup. I suppose that suggests that, at least at first, GMTV was “dirty fed” out from LNN?

It wasn't done like the rest of the schedule, AIUI there was a different set up for the regional news. According to someone I know who worked at Central there the transmission area was taken out of line between 6 and 9:25 and the opt was done just by the news studio.

I don't know if this was just a Central thing or how it worked everywhere. Thing is though for it to happen in a normal way takes more people and introduces more points in the chain for things to go wrong, and more input from the ITV company who weren't officially on air

From what I recall from an old post, the network arrangements for GMTV weren’t as simple as taking the network feed, as there were multiple feeds originating from the South Bank for each advertising region. The splats at 6 and 9.25 were said to be the reconfiguring from the 6 outputs back to 1 main network feed.

I've seen videos with random frames of the wrong region's ident just before 6.00, not quite sure how they managed that but it does suggest a more complex switching operation.