Countdown

Countdown is Channel 4's award winning quiz that has been airing every weekday since 1982. Two contestants engage in a battle of wits competing against the clock in games of lexical dexterity and numerical agility, hoping to win the coveted Countdown teapot.

In 2017 as part of a set and technology refresh, Kinetic Pixel won the tender to supply new scoring and clock control systems. The existing systems were based on legacy technology and had a number of reliability issues.  Considering the production can make up to five shows a day, there was a significant level of risk to the production.

Making our new system work with the old mechanics was a fun challenge. There were no schematics or wiring diagrams available to us to show how the countdown clock works, so we worked closely with the studio engineering team to pick our way through the PLC logic and our software until we found a working solution! We designed and shipped the whole system as a single 20U rack that contains both the primary and backup game systems, which can be rigged and tested by any of the studio technicians.