BBC regions and nations - some notes

It is worth looking for a moment at how the BBC nations and regions network works and some of the issues arising

^{Brian Butterworth published on UK Free TV 11th February 2011 at 07:19}

BBC regions

Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland

The BBC call three parts of the UK "nations": the country of Scotland, the principality of Wales and province of Northern Ireland.

In these "nations" the BBC provides single special versions of the first two television channels. Only in Scotland does this differ from the channel 3 network, where Scotland is broken down into three segments by STV, and the ITV Border covers the south of the country.

In the "nations" there are substantial changes from the "network" versions of BBC One and BBC Two, including special programmes during peak hours, time shifted schedule slots for network programmes and local presentation.

English regions

In England it is now exceptional for there to be BBC regional programmes, aside from the local news and sport programmes. The BBC English regions follow the same transmitter regions as ITV1, with the major exception that the BBC Newcastle also covers the ITV1 TTTV and Border England areas.

Both the BBC and ITV provide all the English regions on satellite, and to do this it is necessary to broadcast each region as a separate channel. For this reason, the BBC has collapsed BBC Two to a single English region for all digital platforms.

Due to the nature of the digital multiplexing system used for Freeview, BBC TWO English regions were never implemented on the terrestrial system, and have never been made available to the "cable headends".

Until switchover is complete, the BBC still has the ability to run the pre-digital era English regions on the analogue network. This means the newest regions collapse on BBC Two to their historic parent so BBC Oxford shows the Southampton service, BBC Cambridge shows the Norwich programme and BBC Hull has the Leeds feed.

Channel Islands

The BBC Channel Islands service is an opt-out from BBC Plymouth, this differs from channel 3 where ITV1 Channels Islands is a Meridian opt-out.

Exceptional situations

Emergency opt-outs on BBC TWO The consequence of the above means that on the rare occasions that regional news cannot be shown as normal on BBC One - such as a national sporting even overrunning - the follow happens:

• Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland - correct regional news
• Digital English regions - BBC London News seen
• Analogue viewers: correct regions until switchover, except for Cambridge, Oxford, Hull and Channel Islands where Norwich, Southampton, Leeds and London are seen.

Emergency BBC service on BBC One

As mentioned above, the BBC regions are opt-outs from the "network" or "sustaining national service".

Sometime, due to technical faults, or when high atmospheric pressure or atmospheric turbulence caused by very heavy rain causes the terrestrial transmission chain is broken the normal transmission chain is broken.

Rather than showing a blank screen, the BBC has a number of backup systems that will use an alternative feed.

When this happens, the BBC London service is seen (the only rare exception to this is a failure of BBC London which brings in the service from BBC Southampton).

As a consumer, of course, you can switch your Sky or Freesat receiver to pull in any BBC region from the Astra 1N satellite service.

However, DVB-S digital satellite service is not compatible with the backup system used for the terrestrial analogue and Freeview network.

The national (or network BBC channels) are provided as a single digital multiplex and are not de-muxed and re-muxed when the signal is re-transmitted locally in the event of terrestrial signal loss.

All of the BBC channels are statically multiplexed ("statmuxed") on a region-by-region basis as these devices are costly to provide.

If the BBC were to support a complete backup multiplex for each region (thus allowing a TV signal to continue without retune or drop-out), that would mean 16 complete new satellite transponders which would cost a huge amount of money for a service that would not be used outside times of exceptional failure.

Alternatively, the BBC could take a regional feed from the feeds on Astra 1N and rebuild the multiplex for each region (and relays) but this would require de-muxing and re-muxing equipment in around over 1000 transmitters, which would also be highly expensive and difficult to manage.

Details of Intelsat 907 transponder 64 (DVB-S2 11495 V 44100-9/10 QPSK):

Intelsat 907 at 27.5°W - LyngSat

BBCA multiplex backup

• BBC One London MPEG-2
• BBC Two England MPEG-2
• CBBC (08-20) MPEG-2
• BBC Three (20-05) MPEG-2
• CBeebies UK (07-20) MPEG-2
• BBC Four (20-04) MPEG-2
• BBC News MPEG-2
• BBC Parliament MPEG-2
• BBC 301 MPEG-2
• BBC One Wales MPEG-2
• BBC One Scotland MPEG-2
• BBC One Northern Ireland MPEG-2
• BBC Radio 1
• BBC Radio 2
• BBC Radio 3
• BBC Radio 4 FM
• BBC Radio 5 Live
• BBC Radio 5 Live Sports Extra
• BBC 6 Music
• BBC Radio 4 Extra
• BBC 1Xtra
• BBC Asian Network
• BBC World Service UK

BBCB multiplex backup

• BBC HD UK MPEG-4/HD
• ITV 1 MPEG-4/HD
• Channel 4 UK MPEG-4/HD
• BBC One MPEG-4/HD