…and finally

Honestly, I would ban young me now-a-days. How much we've all grown up on this place, it's why personally I always took a softer touch with the obviously young and keen members, I remember being one!

RealMedia. Sweet bejesus alive there's some terrible flashbacking right there.

Come on though, RealVideo was great at the time. Streaming video over the internet! Yes the frame rate and video quality now seems atrocious but just the fact that you could watch video clips from the internet of old idents was amazing. I distinctly remember waiting patiently for clips on the original TV Home site to buffer.

Later on the software did get bloated with annoying popups, but if you knew about the stripped down enterprise version that wasn't a problem.

The number of question and exclamation marks is ban worthy in itself!

Haha! I stumbled across an old Hauppauge WinTV card in a drawer the other day. My first TV card was an even cheaper one that I used to record Grampian TV idents, fiddle about converting them to RealMedia files and upload them to a rubbish site I made - as no-one seemed to care much about Grampian at that time. Of course, that xoom.com is no longer around, the Iomega zip disk with the files on is long gone, but the quality was probably so rubbish they would be unwatchable now anyway.

Fun times though, and thankfully TV-ark and others captured those idents anyway (albeit not the Grampian versions ).

Looking back, that package was quite professional (a bit too arty maybe) and I can't believe there were so many variations, considering what we get on the main channels now!

One of the frustrating things of the early days of TVF was that I wasn't able to contribute video which is now so much easier than it's ever been.

I used to get the bus into central London to use one of the massive EasyEverything internet cafes where I'd have to download RealPlayer to watch old clips on TV Ark and other early pres sites, along with reading this forum. I did that on a regular basis until 2008 when I was able to get the internet at home as home internet became cheaper than paying for a pass at the net cafe.

No! Don't shut down TVFourm!

That’ll change Asa’s mind.

When I first read the announcement, my first thought was..."all good things must come to an end." I remember when I first stumbled upon this forum back in 2002 while looking for audio files from different TV shows. Little did I know then that I would visit this site almost daily; therefore, I have a deeper appreciation for all the technical efforts behind the scenes—the people who make this magic called television happen daily. I will miss all the talented members who have created mocks that often look better than what we see on TV, and those insiders who either confirmed or denied rumors about revamps.

Reading Asa's announcement, I can't help but appreciate his time and dedication (also the moderators) to make sure things ran the way they did for over 20 years. Thanks for creating and maintaining this amazing community!

A successor is opening next week. See the TV Live Forum thread in the websites section.


Or see: www.tvliveforum.com

Real Producer was how we first started Webcasting for Radio 1. It was done over ISDN, and produced multiple bitrate streams over a 128kb/s bearer.
Today the quality would look poor, but it was the start of it all.
(I did one webcast, not for R1, with Peter Stringfellow being interviewed. He was wearing a tiger print coat. The encoder was so busy trying to code the coat that his face disappeared......)

I’ll really miss this place. I generally avoided heated arguments on this forum but one really fun memory was a fun spat I had with @VMPhil about Konnie Huq’s presenting abilities on Xtra Factor exactly 10 years ago to the day. Fun times. Best wishes to one and all!

Here is a link to the thread from a younger more petulant self: https://tvforum.uk/tvhome/x-factor-2011-32026

Thank you @Bail for putting some manners on me.