Sky News returns to Studio A with a new look

Sky News launched a new schedule earlier this week, and today, Wednesday 4th Febraury, one day before their 20th birthday, they launched their new look with instead of one big set with 8 presentation points, they're using 4 smaller sets.

The first set we saw at 6am was the new look to Sky News Sunrise.



The desk had been described as a chat show desk and it has to be said, the look is somewhat reminiscent of a chat show set, like the interview sets for Jay Leno's Tonight Show, or the Late Show with David Letterman.

But it does give Sunrise a very distinctive look, which is more relaxed than Sunrise had previously been. This set is also used for Jeff Randall Live.

The second set we saw at 10am was a desk based set for Sky News Today.



This seems to be the basic set, which may well get used on other programmes.

The third and final set we saw was at 2pm for Afternoon Live.



This set has also been used for the infamous News Sport & Weather, for 15 minutes, every 15 minutes.

Live at Five used the second set, but with the anchor desk rotated to a different position.



This is also done for Sky News at Ten. This gives Live at Five and Sky News at Ten an almost flagship style look compared to the other bulletins and programmes.

I like the new sets, they have managed to make the one studio look much better than it did even when the new studio was launched in 2005. Now, if they can just take out the slight conservativeness that has infected their agenda in the past few years, they'll be heading back to the top of the news channel wars. But until they lose that very slight bias they have, they will lose out to BBC News 24.

Iranian International News Channel highlights story about Impeaching President Bush. Surprised?

Well,I can honestly say I'm not surprised about the decision by Press TV to highlight this story on their front page.

It's well known that George W Bush is not exactly the most popular US President in the world at large, except of course to American conservatives and Republicans. But remember this is a state-funded media organisation, much like the BBC and Voice Of America. The head of Press TV claims that they maintain editorial independence from the government, though this is disputed.

Whether they are independent or not, ultimately how they will be judged is on the stories they cover and how they cover them.

Watching the news on the net.

So, the recent trend for news channels to broadcast on the net continues. The most recent addition is BBC News 24, which can now be watched live on the net. My only concern is that the bandwidth stream being allocated for both video and audio is only 34kbps!

When we have broadband services that start at 2mbps, going up to around 16mbps, a 34kbps stream seems to be either a cost cutting measure, or just plain silly. 34kbps videos are not very watchable and the audio is pretty crappy. Give it at least 100kbps. The video would be better but certainly not special, but it would be at least watchable, and it would be possible to at least listen to it, if you happened to be doing something else.

At least RTE give their live news video at least 225kbps!