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- This article is about the techical phenomenon, for the Iain Banks novel see Dead Air.
Under British broadcasting laws, any radio station which transmits dead air for more than ten minutes without rectifying the situation, broadcasting an announcement, or warning its listeners, can be penalised or fined up to £25,000 per minute. The regulator for this used to be the Radio Authority, which has since become part of OFCOM, a unit of the British government.
Dead air can also apply to television broadcasting, generally when a television channel has an interruption to its output, resulting in a blank screen or in the case of digital television, a frozen image, until output is restored or an apology message is broadcast.
Having dead air during commercials or sponsorship announcements can cost networks considerable advertising revenue.
Examples
An example of dead air was a Chris Evans radio transmission for the British Virgin Radio station. As a promotional stunt, Evans did not arrive for work, and his show went to air carrying nothing for about twenty five minutes.
Another case was BBC Radio 4's failure to broadcast Big Ben's midnight chimes on New Year's Day 2003; after announcing the chimes, a technical error caused the station to fall silent for a minute. This was caused by the correct feed not being faded up. Ironically, the chimes were supposed to be coming via a new link which the BBC had just installed to Westminster just to avoid cases of dead air.
On September 11, 1987, Dan Rather walked off the set of the CBS Evening News when a broadcast of a tennis match threatened to delay the start of his news broadcast. The match then ended sooner than expected but Rather was gone. The network broadcast six minutes of dead air before Rather was found and returned to the studio. There was considerable criticism of Rather for the incident.
See also
"Dead air"