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BBC Regional SD/HD Transmissions

Was BBC Regional Redundancies

This site closed in March 2021 and is now a read-only archive
MA
Markymark
Cold Open posted:
Markymark posted:
I actually doubt anybody other than 'people like us' who have sat through the regional news, see the One Show in HD.

As the London area accounts for about 25% of England's population, then at a stroke 1 in 4 HD viewers could at least have the correct regional news on BBC 1 HD, but the Beeb continues to cut its nose to spite its face....


Which inherently means that 75% of England's population (i.e. the MAJORITY of England's licence fee payers) would be getting explicitly the wrong region on HD!



Well, governments in some democracies get elected in on similar 'majorities' !)

The Beeb don't seem to have any 'hang ups' about filling the regional slots on the News Channel version of Breakfast with London News ? Cool

Mod edit: Quote removed

And how do those figures compare with ITV regions ? (Both single region sites (Granada, London) and multi-region
sites, (WestCountry, Meridian etc) ?
MK
Mr Kite
Cold Open posted:
Markymark posted:
I actually doubt anybody other than 'people like us' who have sat through the regional news, see the One Show in HD.

As the London area accounts for about 25% of England's population, then at a stroke 1 in 4 HD viewers could at least have the correct regional news on BBC 1 HD, but the Beeb continues to cut its nose to spite its face....


Which inherently means that 75% of England's population (i.e. the MAJORITY of England's licence fee payers) would be getting explicitly the wrong region on HD!


With respect, so what? If the rest of us don't have our local news in HD in the first place, then we lose nothing. As farcical as the situation with HD BBC regions is, depriving a good chunk of the population of getting their correct local news in HD just because much of the rest of the country can't have it, is rather daft. Those unwilling to press a button on their remote to watch their own region on SD can't care all that much about it to begin with.
CI
cityprod
Markymark posted:
Cold Open posted:
Markymark posted:
I actually doubt anybody other than 'people like us' who have sat through the regional news, see the One Show in HD.

As the London area accounts for about 25% of England's population, then at a stroke 1 in 4 HD viewers could at least have the correct regional news on BBC 1 HD, but the Beeb continues to cut its nose to spite its face....


Which inherently means that 75% of England's population (i.e. the MAJORITY of England's licence fee payers) would be getting explicitly the wrong region on HD!



Well, governments in some democracies get elected in on similar 'majorities' !)

The Beeb don't seem to have any 'hang ups' about filling the regional slots on the News Channel version of Breakfast with London News ? Cool


That's because the cost of filling what is a total of 50 minutes a week (5 days of 4x 2.5 slots), would be stupid. What are you going to do in that time, extra international news? a return of UK Today? It's pointless for such a minor amount of time per week.
MA
Markymark
cityprod posted:
Markymark posted:
Cold Open posted:

Which inherently means that 75% of England's population (i.e. the MAJORITY of England's licence fee payers) would be getting explicitly the wrong region on HD!



Well, governments in some democracies get elected in on similar 'majorities' !)

The Beeb don't seem to have any 'hang ups' about filling the regional slots on the News Channel version of Breakfast with London News ? Cool


That's because the cost of filling what is a total of 50 minutes a week (5 days of 4x 2.5 slots), would be stupid. What are you going to do in that time, extra international news? a return of UK Today? It's pointless for such a minor amount of time per week.


Well, I could turn the argument round, why not do as BBC 1 HD does in those slots and show a caption ?
CI
cityprod
Markymark posted:
cityprod posted:
Markymark posted:

Well, governments in some democracies get elected in on similar 'majorities' !)

The Beeb don't seem to have any 'hang ups' about filling the regional slots on the News Channel version of Breakfast with London News ? Cool


That's because the cost of filling what is a total of 50 minutes a week (5 days of 4x 2.5 slots), would be stupid. What are you going to do in that time, extra international news? a return of UK Today? It's pointless for such a minor amount of time per week.


Well, I could turn the argument round, why not do as BBC 1 HD does in those slots and show a caption ?


Really??? You're going to suggest that a news channel show a static caption for 2.5 minutes a time, every time??? Say the words out loud, and you'll realise how insane they sound. The reason they use BBC London is simple. It's the default for network BBC1 anyway for the regions to opt out of. And if you're showing it on the news channel as well, then might as well just include it as try to do something else with the slot anyway.
MA
Markymark
cityprod posted:
Markymark posted:
cityprod posted:

That's because the cost of filling what is a total of 50 minutes a week (5 days of 4x 2.5 slots), would be stupid. What are you going to do in that time, extra international news? a return of UK Today? It's pointless for such a minor amount of time per week.


Well, I could turn the argument round, why not do as BBC 1 HD does in those slots and show a caption ?


Really??? You're going to suggest that a news channel show a static caption for 2.5 minutes a time, every time??? Say the words out loud, and you'll realise how insane they sound. The reason they use BBC London is simple. It's the default for network BBC1 anyway for the regions to opt out of. And if you're showing it on the news channel as well, then might as well just include it as try to do something else with the slot anyway.


So how's that still acceptable on BBC 1 HD then ?

By the way, try not to be so rude and please calm down, it does you no credit
PE
Pete Founding member
noggin posted:
Distribution of every regional BBC One feed on satellite in HD will either need a lot of additional transponder capacity (and that costs a lot more money) or the BBC might have to do what ITV has started to do, which is reduce the number of SD regions on satellite to free up capacity for more HD services (though the BBC may feel it can't do that in the way ITV can because of their licence fee funding)


So on Virgin Media we've already got rid of BBC One Scotland SD and 101 is now the HD version. I suppose Virgin are a bit more forceful than Sky in terms of replacing non-HD equipment (think they killed of the last SD only boxes a while ago?). What proportion of Sky's boxes are likely to be SD only still? Do their HD boxes downscale for SD displays?
MA
Markymark
Pete posted:
noggin posted:
Distribution of every regional BBC One feed on satellite in HD will either need a lot of additional transponder capacity (and that costs a lot more money) or the BBC might have to do what ITV has started to do, which is reduce the number of SD regions on satellite to free up capacity for more HD services (though the BBC may feel it can't do that in the way ITV can because of their licence fee funding)


So on Virgin Media we've already got rid of BBC One Scotland SD and 101 is now the HD version. I suppose Virgin are a bit more forceful than Sky in terms of replacing non-HD equipment (think they killed of the last SD only boxes a while ago?). What proportion of Sky's boxes are likely to be SD only still? Do their HD boxes downscale for SD displays?


The older HD boxes had Scart ouputs, so yes. The present Sky Q box is HDMI only, I don't think any TVs with HDMI inputs are SD anyway? Even if so, you should be able to drive the box to output 576? (SD)
VA
valley
Pete posted:
noggin posted:
Distribution of every regional BBC One feed on satellite in HD will either need a lot of additional transponder capacity (and that costs a lot more money) or the BBC might have to do what ITV has started to do, which is reduce the number of SD regions on satellite to free up capacity for more HD services (though the BBC may feel it can't do that in the way ITV can because of their licence fee funding)


So on Virgin Media we've already got rid of BBC One Scotland SD and 101 is now the HD version. I suppose Virgin are a bit more forceful than Sky in terms of replacing non-HD equipment (think they killed of the last SD only boxes a while ago?). What proportion of Sky's boxes are likely to be SD only still? Do their HD boxes downscale for SD displays?

Considering Sky phased out SD boxes in 2010, I can’t imagine it’s very high.
VA
valley
Do you know what that is as a percentage of total boxes? Makes sense that people would keep using older SD boxes as secondary ones for other rooms etc. - maybe a better question is how many people still use SD boxes as their primary system...
LL
London Lite Founding member
And what does this data tell us? That SD is still popular in homes with secondary sets and I suspect those people who have the huge Full HD/4K sets and then end up watching a crap 544x576 SD channel with a low bitrate on it anyway!
RK
Rkolsen
Markymark posted:
Rkolsen posted:
noggin posted:

There are a couple of issues here :


2. Distributing BBC One HD English regional variations. On Freeview HD this is possible - as there are already matching BBC One HD encoders for every ITV HD regional variation (a consequence of stat muxing PSB3 - the PSB HD mux) - though if the BBC regionalise more than ITV they will need to fund additional encoders not just for each BBC One HD variation - but also for BBC Two HD, ITV HD, C4 HD and C5 HD - even if they aren't regional - as that's how stat mux works)

Why would additional encoders be needed for BBC Two, Channel 4 and Channel 5 HD? Doesn’t one encoder (presumably there for ITV) take all the inputs at a standard bit rate and output a stat muxed stream ready to the transmitter?


Yes, but the stat mux encoders all need to 'trade' with each other, so as Noggin points out, you still need new encoders for BBC 2, C4, and C5 etc, to negotiate the bit-budget with the BBC 1 and ITV 1 encoders


Markymark posted:
Rkolsen posted:
noggin posted:

There are a couple of issues here :


2. Distributing BBC One HD English regional variations. On Freeview HD this is possible - as there are already matching BBC One HD encoders for every ITV HD regional variation (a consequence of stat muxing PSB3 - the PSB HD mux) - though if the BBC regionalise more than ITV they will need to fund additional encoders not just for each BBC One HD variation - but also for BBC Two HD, ITV HD, C4 HD and C5 HD - even if they aren't regional - as that's how stat mux works)

Why would additional encoders be needed for BBC Two, Channel 4 and Channel 5 HD? Doesn’t one encoder (presumably there for ITV) take all the inputs at a standard bit rate and output a stat muxed stream ready to the transmitter?


Yes, but the stat mux encoders all need to 'trade' with each other, so as Noggin points out, you still need new encoders for BBC 2, C4, and C5 etc, to negotiate the bit-budget with the BBC 1 and ITV 1 encoders

Okay. Things must be a bit different there. In the US the various program feeds are set to the ATSC encoder which takes the feeds and massages the data in it of itself.

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