C-Day is the name of two television-related events: 1 March 1975, when Australia moved to regular

colour television Color television or Colour television is a television transmission technology that includes color information for the picture, so the video image can be displayed in color on the television set. It improves on the monochrome or black-and-white t ...

, and 1 July 2000, the day the UK television industry began accepting only

widescreen Widescreen images are displayed within a set of aspect ratios (relationship of image width to height) used in film, television and computer screens. In film, a widescreen film is any film image with a width-to-height aspect ratio greater than t ...

commercials, an important step in the general move of broadcasting in the UK to the picture format.

Colour Television in Australia

Australia was a little late in introducing

, to choose the correct television system, waiting about 8 years from the time

PAL Phase Alternating Line (PAL) is a colour encoding system for analogue television. It was one of three major analogue colour television standards, the others being NTSC and SECAM. In most countries it was broadcast at 625 lines, 50 fields (25 ...

was invented. It was then forbidden for broadcasters to transmit the chroma burst signal, until the designated day, 1 March 1975. 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 A monochrome or monochromatic image, object or palette is composed of one color (or values of one color). Images using only shades of grey are called grayscale (typically digital) or black-and-white (typically analog). In physics, monochrom ...

. There were some people who built a circuit to circumvent this, where they would synchronise the

chrominance Chrominance (''chroma'' or ''C'' for short) is the signal used in video systems to convey the color information of the picture (see YUV color model), separately from the accompanying luma signal (or Y' for short). Chrominance is usually represente ...

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) 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 Terrestrial refers to things related to land or the planet Earth. Terrestrial may also refer to: * Terrestrial animal, an animal that lives on land opposed to living in water, or sometimes an animal that lives on or near the ground, as opposed to ...

broadcasters) or in whole (many cable television and satellite television channels) continued to broadcast a 4:3 frame. It was originally proposed by ITV in July 1999. ITV and

Channel 4 Channel 4 is a British free-to-air public broadcast television network operated by the state-owned Channel Four Television Corporation. It began its transmission on 2 November 1982 and was established to provide a fourth television service ...

took advantage of C-Day to update their continuity suites to be widescreen capable, broadcasting their

idents Station identification (ident, network ID or channel ID or bumper) is the practice of radio and television stations and networks identifying themselves on-air, typically by means of a call sign or brand name (sometimes known, particularly in the ...

in widescreen.

External links

C-Day_[UK
/nowiki>_Technical_Guide.html" ;"title="K">C-Day [UK
/nowiki> Technical Guide">K">C-Day [UK
/nowiki> Technical Guideh1>

References

1975 in Australian television 2000 in British television {{UK-tv-stub