Coventry Cable - Local Programming

Coventry Cable started with lofty ideas of providing a local channel, funded partly through advertising. In the Whitley Village building, there was a studio and edit suites built to facilitate this.

Unfortunately, due to the lower numbers of subscribers and the small advertising revenue the local programming was scaled back to a volunteer based operation and eventually ceased altogether.

A two camera studio and gallery was built on the top floor, unfortunately because of the sloping roof, the studio shape was not cubic, which didn't help. As space was limited, there was no prop storage space, so all programmes had a very similar feel to them, and the lighting rig (using if I remember 1Kw fresnels) tended to heat up the studio to a rather unpleasant temperature.

The cameras were Sony 3 tube multicore cameras connected to a CCU in the gallery. Each was equipped with an autocue, very useful but it made the whole tripod setup front heavy and unweildly to move about. As the studio was quite small, not much room to actually move the tripod either.

The original Vision mixer was a Sony SEG2000 (composite), above it can be seen an external chroma key unit and extended wipe unit. Later this was updated to a Grass Valley mixer, but still composite. The sound was on a Sony (MXP21) 8 channel mixer.

Graphics were provided by an Aston character generator. On the floor at the right hand side can be seen a High Band U-matic which was used to record. Later there were two VTRs fitted in a rack allowing inserts to be played into a programme. One of these was a Betacam to playback the tapes from the portable ENG style camera (centre in the camera picture).

Edit 1 was an audio suite comprising a small work are and a soundproof “Meatsafe”, the door of which is just visible on the right hand side. This provided an acoustically dead area, really too dead for most usage.

Equipment provided was a 4 track Tascam 1/4“ reel to reel recorder, a Sony MXP10 audio mixer and a record turntable.

No pics of Edit2, from memory it was adjacent to the Studio on the top floor, and a basic 2-vtr suite without a discrete edit controller, Betacam players and recorders could be linked via the 9-pin interface and the recorder would control the player.

Edit 3 was a 3 machine suite with a Sony edit controller to control two Betacam players and a U-matic Hiband recorder. To allow disolves, a Grass Valley video mixer was included, and a Sony MXP10 audio desk.

Basic monitoring was peovided by a 2U waveform monitor and vectorscope.

MCR and Presentation took on several functions.

The MCR aspect was to monitor to quality of outgoing programmes for the network, the wall of screens showed all the channels being carried, off the photo on the left hand side were 5 screens for the off air BBC / ITV channels.

The Presentation aspect was for playback of locally sourced channels, this included the Local Channel, played off HiBand U-Matic, Home Video Channel (HVC) which was played back off LoBand U-Matic, some Indian lanuguage minority channels played back off VHS, generally in very low quality. Some satellite channels were added here, TVE for schools Spanish Language and ARTE from D2-MAC, this was the best quality channel carried, but the stereo digital audio ended up being distrubuted as just a mono audio channel with the PAL video. They were in fact carried on a wideband FM link back to the headend, demodulated to baseband video and audio and then remodulated on to a cable TV channel.

The Racks (left) shows two Sync Pulse Generators (SPG) and a changeover unit, and below a stack of Video distribution amplifiers for circulating black and burst and the local channel round the building. At the top of the 2nd from left rack, there was a time of day timecode generator distributed to all edit suites which in addition provided a signal for some wall clocks.

There was also a Talkback station which connected to the MCR and the edit suites and studio. The mobile rack in front was used measurement and had a grade 2 Sony monitor with a Tektronix waveform monitor and vectorscope.

In addition, there was a channel played back off Laservision disks called The Cable Jukebox https://www.discogs.com/label/1842528-The-Cable-Jukebox.

Cable TV subscribers could call a number and select a track to play, this would be queued and then played out in sequence. Each month the LaserVision disks were swapped out for a new set. (Major Mike, you know who you are!)

The stack of eight Laservision players were controlled by a rack mount DEC Rainbow 100 computer. This was an unusual beast, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_100. The version in use here ran CP/M.

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