Some quick notes on the ITN Sports Channel, which launched at 10am Thursday. You may know it better as Setanta Sports News.

• It takes guts to launch a channel with the standard top-of-the-hour sting, and give the headlines before welcoming us to the show. Or, almost exactly the same as the launch of the ITN News Channel in 2000.
• Cor! The old 5 News atrium. Remember when Channel 5 did news? Actually, remember Channel 5 at all? And is that the desk used by Jonathan Bumblebee and Nick Robinson for Vote 2005?
• The screen layout is trying to out-Bloomberg Bloomberg (sample Bloomberg shot, circa 2005), replacing actual content with a vam-vam-vam information blast. The presenters are squashed into a box on the right side of the screen, about two-thirds of the width, and maybe half the width of the screen. Above them, a three-line display of static captions, explaining a story. To the left, a constantly refreshing list of league tables. Below them, two scrolling tickers.
• Bloomberg, we note, has recently (and wisely) thrown away its ugly screen showing 855 pieces of information at the same time (though never the piece we want to find), and replaced it with a cleaner look. The presenter fills 90% of the screen, the ticker is reduced to two lines, and the only intrusion into the main picture are captions and the clock. There's still too much text movement, but it's far less like legions of financial statistics assaulting your brain.
• The gold standard for news presentation remains CNN International, putting up crisp one-line summaries along the bottom of the screen.
• The league tables featured are England I to V, and Scotland A to D. No Division VI, no top scorers, no rugby, no mention of the cricket score, and (shock!) no biathlon results. Canadian hockey, yes; NFL-ball, no. Wonder if they'll put up the NCAA-ball scores on Sunday morning?
• On Thursday, the tables flashed through far too quickly, spending about three seconds on each frame. This had slowed by Friday.
• And the content. What content? No actual clips of matches until after 10pm, and only an endlessly-repeated statement by Portsmouth manager Mr. Redknapp to play, and replay, and replay.
• While it's useful to show the day's fixtures, it's more useful to show such matters as the kick-off time, and which UEFA Cup group the matches are in. Braga - Bayern had resonance for British fans in a way that Elfsborg's match didn't.
• The matchday screen replaces the three-line infobox above the presenters with a five-line vidiprinter. There is call for a ticker, but we reckon the best approach was ITV2's Football First programme (1998-2003), which used the space to the side of the screen to give the score for each division in turn. It's been aped by the BBC's Score (2002-7), but seems to have fallen out of fashion in favour of tedious tickers. It'll be interesting to see a Saturday matchday, when the BBC's current ticker fails dismally, showing a match's score for about five seconds in three minutes.
• The typefaces are inconsistent, using at least four different sizes of a headline font, one that's difficult to read at the best of times. And all the writing is in capital letters, as if the channel is shouting at us to disguise the paucity of actual content.
• Quick wins? Get rid of the tables, they add nothing to the show. Move the storybox to the bottom, and give meaningful one-liners. If the ticker needs to stay during daytime programmes - and it may be easier to keep than ditch - then reduce it to a single level.
• Adding worthwhile content is more difficult, and will take time. We would hope that the ITN Sports Channel will quickly strike deals with ITV for their rights. The obsession with football is depressing, but understandable. Repeating the same clips every ten minutes through the day is not.

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