BBC cuts jobs / Charter renewal

But remember that most commercial music stations have very little speech content apart from at breakfast. It would be hard for the BBC to justify doing less speech content on Radios 1 and 2, unless they were playing music that can't be found anywhere else.

I'll be interested to see what impact the new Chris Moyles show on Radio X has on the industry. Speech led with a bit of music, basically tearing up the rule book for how to do commercial music radio by doing the the same show he did at the beeb with less news and a couple of ad breaks an hour.

Seems to be getting the punters judging by social media and the podcast chart, the first rajar is some way off.

Indeed - if the listening figures are good, it could well be a bit of a game-changer for commercial radio...

I don't think Moyles is going to have any affect on the commercial radio industry, yes his show will be either a relative or massive hit but that's because he's Chris Moyles he's just about the only name in radio who can generate those numbers and that's because of the fanbase he built up at Radio 1. Also Radio X was starting from a base of having no listeners with no publicising of the service so things can only ever be viewed as a success.


Realistically it's not going to change what 'Ian & Tina' are doing on Heart Dorset.

...although they sort of do already, as Ericsson also have the playout contract for ITV and Channel 4.

(Ingest isn't really the right word either though.)

They've tried that before - it didn't go down very well I seem to remember...

The tendency on forums like this is that the services that people suggest closing just happen to be ones that they don't personally use or enjoy. I listen to 6 Music every day and would hate to see it cut back or closed; whereas the News Channel could close tomorrow and I wouldn't miss it. I'm sure there are others that would have the opposite opinion - it all comes down to personal taste.

What I was getting at is that if the BBC was handling the multiplexing would they be the ones to take the feeds from ITV/C4 HD before sending them to the transmitter?

Yes, that's the current situation with Atos, so it will be the same if the Beeb bring it back in house

I think you are confusing playout with distribution. Ingest is a playout function,

AIUI the following is the current division of responsibilities.

Ericsson (formerly known as Red Bee Media, formerly known as BBC Broadcast) handle channel playout for BBC, ITV, C4 and other channels in the UK. They will ingest the pre-recorded material (which is delivered on tape or via a DPP compliant AS11 AVCi 100Mbs file) and accept incoming live feeds from studios and OBs (I think - though this may not be the case - that ATOS handle the incoming and outgoing lines operation for Ericsson) They will operate the channel playout - working with scheduling teams from the broadcasters - to create the channels that are then routed elsewhere for distribution..

Atos (formerly Siemens, but who sold that bit of their operation to Atos. That bit being originally BBC Technology before being bought from the BBC by Siemens) handle the BBCs lines infrastructure (including the large Raman video contribution network) and satellite uplink and downlink, as well as their DSat and DTT coding and mux operations that take the (baseband I think) channel feeds (BBC SD, and BBC, ITV, C4 HD) and encodes them for transmission. I believe Atos also handle the DSat uplink.

Arqiva (which is a final merger of what was the BBC and IBA TV transmitter operation - which was sold to Crown Castle and NTL respectively) handle the fibre distribution to transmitters and the DTT transmission.

That's a pretty fair summary of it - though you can see why they might want to rationalise it a bit.


The delivery point for live programmes on BBC channels is still CCA (or rather its replacement, which is now in the Broadcast Centre and elsewhere); the OB or studio will line up with an engineer in CCA, who will make sure that they're across the right circuits and that all the audio tracks are in the right order, and the talkback is working correctly; they'll then pass this down some lines to ECA, Ericsson's control room (who will do the same again); and finally they'll make it available to the playout director.

This isn't the case for all of Ericsson's clients - for example, Channel 4 live programmes are picked up directly by Ericsson's MCR, without another control room in between.

Thank you for correcting me. MDTauk said that the BBC multiplexing in house so I assume they would be the place where the different feeds for ITV and Channel 4 HD would come in and be sent out in the simplest terms. If the BBC were handling these functions could they feasibly start rolling out HD regions (if they were equipped like London) as they would have some equipment necessary to handle the macro regions for ITV?

There's nothing to stop them doing it now..... except for all the work and expense it would take.

In-house or out of house it's still the same broadcast infrastructure, all that really changes is just who pays the staff who look after it. I'd imagine that as the equipment is replaced over the next few years everythign will be re-engineered for HD