C-Day

C-Day

C-Day

Name used for two different one-off events related to television in different countries

C-Day is the name of two television-related events: 1 March 1975, when Australia moved to regular colour television, and 1 July 2000, the day the UK television industry began accepting only widescreen commercials, an important step in the general move of broadcasting in the UK to the picture format.

For the military use of "C-Day", see Military designation of days and hours.

Colour Television in Australia

Australia was a little late in introducing colour television, to choose the correct television system, waiting about 8 years from the time PAL was invented.

It was then forbidden for broadcasters to transmit the chroma burst signal, until the designated day, 1 March 1975.[1][2] The broadcasters were allowed to experiment with transmitting colour signals in the picture area, and get their transmission up and running while people who had already bought colour TV sets could only watch the shows in black and white monochrome. There were some people who built a circuit to circumvent this, where they would synchronise the chrominance decoding oscillator manually.

Commercials-Day in the UK

C-Day or Commercials-Day, 1 July 2000, was the date at which UK broadcasters (with the exception of MTV and VH1[3]) changed from requiring 4:3 aspect ratio commercials, to requiring 16:9 Full Height commercials supplied to them, shot "14:9 safe" for those channels which in part (i.e. the analogue feeds of Terrestrial broadcasters) or in whole (many cable television and satellite television channels) continued to broadcast a 4:3 frame.[4]

It was originally proposed by ITV in July 1999.[5][6]

ITV and Channel 4 took advantage of C-Day to update their continuity suites to be widescreen capable, broadcasting their idents in widescreen.[7]

References

  1. [1]
    "Friday 28 February 1975 — MELBOURNE". Television.AU. 29 June 2013. Retrieved 5 October 2020.
  2. [2]
    "40 years of colour TV". Television.AU. 7 October 2014. Retrieved 5 October 2020.
  3. [3]
    "IPA warns on international perspective on widescreen". Institute of Practitioners in Advertising. 7 July 2000. Archived from the original on 26 September 2006.
  4. [4]
    "'C-Day', UK commercials go widescreen". seizmic limited. Archived from the original on 24 September 2006.
  5. [5]
    Tylee, John (23 July 1999). "ITV names the day for transmission of ads in wide format". Campaign. Archived from the original on 5 October 2020. Retrieved 5 October 2020.
  6. [6]
    "ITV SETS JULY 2000 DATE TO SWITCH TO WIDESCREEN ADS". Broadcast. 29 July 1999. Archived from the original on 13 January 2016. Retrieved 5 October 2020.
  7. [7]
    "ITV • Ulster Television • July 2000 – January 2001 • Idents [1]". The TV Room. Archived from the original on 15 July 2012.
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