Cheviot Studios

The Cheviot Studios is a media production and playout facility based within Newcastle-upon-Tyne, North East England, operated by Emoa and NETV. The site comprises of four main complexes, namely:
 * Durham: The largest building; formally a multiplex cinema. It currently houses 3 production studios and most departments of Emoa Productions, all departments of Neptune Television, content and playout of NETV, plus Licencing and Advertising provided by Emoa Television directly. Other departments include ESS, Teletext, NETV News, general communication, PR, emergency playout, archive, music & publishing, Powerstation, and DETV (Residuary).
 * Cleveland: New building erected in 2007, predominately housing Financial departments, health & safety a sound editing suite and the headquarters of Emoa Group and its boardrooms. Most senior figures occupy offices in Cleveland.
 * Tyneside: Formally part of a police building; houses most ICT and communications systems, along with departments of site maintainance and employment centre
 * Northumberland: New building erected in 2006 originally for usage by DETV Group and Emoa International; now houses all departments of Emoa Performance along with advertising, digital planning, comissioning, royalties, web sales and external assets. GTV also holds an office in the building.

The Durham Building currently consists of three studios; two main larger studios for non-regional production, and a third smaller one.

Studios
The complex consists of 3 large studios, with studios 1 and 3 partitioned into two (which are able to re-merge for large productions featuring audiences). Studios 1-3 are situated in the Durham Building, where an additional presentation studio, "W", is situated in the Northumberland building. A further studio is to be constructed in 2009/10 resulting from an extention to the Tyneside building.

Regular usage of each studio is as follows:
 * Studio 1A - First Avenue
 * Studio 1B - Afterparty (June-September) / First Avenue (September-June) / Location Factors
 * Studio 2 - Chain Links (June-September) / Stewart (September-May)
 * Studio 3A - NETV News & Weather / Emoa Lobby / North Community
 * Studio 3B - Tied and Tested / Loose Connections
 * Studio W - NETV Weather (weekends) / X-Stream

It also houses playout facilities for NETV, and ESS, alongside provision of Emoa's sub-network blank stream to GTV.

For NETV, it works in conjunction with Middlesbrough Centre, which produces regional news programming for the southern half of the NETV region. All playout, advertising and presentation is handled by Cheviot Studios, NETV North.

A re-organisation of departments was undertaken in August 2007, leading to greater integration between the various companies. All signage throughout the building is branded as "Emoa and NETV".

Playout
The Bombarda Playout Centre was fitted in July 2006, replacing a former tempoary off-site facility. It consists of 5 playout systems, arranged as follows:
 * B1: NETV North / ESS
 * B2: Backup facility (previously used by GTV)
 * B3: Clean feed (for GTV and Mercia) / Network-wide broadcasts
 * B4: NETV South
 * B5: Interactive services

From 15 June 2009, the Interactive Service playout will cease from suite B5, and will be moved to a new facility which is soon to be available. New digital channel NETV Breeze will be broadcast from suite B2 from 22 June, although its test broadcasts will begin from 1 June. In the event of emergency during times when all 5 suites are in use, NETV Breeze can be taken off air at any time, followed by Interactive and NETV South. Uplinking of network programming by Emoa is dealt with in B3, which also provides a "clean feed" of sub-networked programmes to GTV and Mercia. All 5 suites are able to playout to digital terrestrial and satellite, and B1, B2 and B4 retain compatibility for analogue playout (analogue cable will be retained by cable providers post-Digital Switchover, so B1 and B3 analogue playout systems will be retained). A full HD playout suite is planned for the future. Emoa's current HD programming which is simulcast on Six HD is currently uplinked through additional hardware on system B4, however this method has been described as "inadequate".

Neptune owns a proprietary playout software application named BombarderMediator, which as of the most recent version 7.9.9d, does not fully support HD playout and re-SD encoding on-the-fly. Neptune plans to almost re-write the program for version 8, which will also free up a lot of resources which could lead to better HD support and a more reliable output, along with MPEG-4 and DVB-T2 support for digital terrestrial. BombarderMediator is installed at Cheviot Studios, Middlesbrough Centre, Gael Studios and Emoa Birmingham facilities, however its central mainframe is external to all four centres. Mercia's opt-out studios in Oxford and Nottingham however continue to use the systems installed by Spectrum for the "foreseeable future".

Digital channel Six Mix previously used suite B4 with both subregions of NETV being controlled from B1. After Emoa sold the channel in 2007, NETV South moved into the system to provide a more reliable playout of the service, although it only opts out of the NETV North feed from B1 for advertising and news. However, Emoa anticipates for NETV South to return to B1 in the near future, as it claims NETV South's suite is "vastly disproportionate" to the service it provides (since NETV South's news playout is dealt with in Middlesbrough, it leaves Cheviot only to advertising and regional opt-outs). Six Mix is now played out by Clydern Television in Glasgow. Suite B4 is the smallest and contains the oldest hardware of the 5 centres, and is due for upgrading in 2011, although Emoa has stated it will not upgrade the centre if it still just playing out NETV South at that time.