Bvsh Hovse's posts, page 10

bbc.co.uk

But would have been a fantastic waste of time and money. The big advantage of everything being the same is that the work has already been done before, meaning the turn around time for the new sites is greatly reduced. I believe the first project meeting for this was at the end of March (after the team had finished Brasil), so the whole lot has been done in 3 months. New branding, lots of new features and a move into a different CMS - and hit the launch date set last March exactly. The last relaunch of the site for TV was pretty much only a rebranding exercise and took nearly twice as long to deliver because it was all bespoke.


While I know the current look has it's supporters, I don't think it has aged very well and is looking a little dated IMHO. I have seen a change requests recently for updating the graphics on one of the ATV broadcast systems. Whether this is related to a TV rebranding I couldn't say.

bbc.co.uk

This is being worked on now. A lot of the regions infrastructure is quite old though, so it involves bandwidth and hardware upgrades rather than just installing new software codecs. The timeframe is months rather than weeks for them all to be converted.

The same goes for regional radio. A lot of it is still being encoded centrally at Maidenhead. World Service stopped doiing this last November, the national networks stopped a few weeks ago as part of 'Coyopa'. I don't know if audio encoding will also get devolved to the regions, but I'd expect it would need to be to get the best possible quality increase out of the move to AAC+.


The Real and Windows streams have not gone away, they are being maintained for mobile devices and internet radios that do not support the flash encapsulated streams. You can find links to the Windows Media and Real streams here.

BBC World News: Presentation

What I think the grab illustrates best is is how easily BBC Persian fit into that studio. I know a lot of people think the uniform branding across the BBC is boring, but this is why it works so well. All that's changed is a few lights have been reprogrammed, which will have cost nothing. Compare that to work and cost involved in having to ship out a new backdrop and furniture, get it installed, maybe get the lights refocused then return everything back to normal afterwards.

BBC World News: Presentation

The cost of the kit is rapidly falling so it may not add a huge amount to the overall cost. Remember everything is being built from scratch, and is expected to be the home of news for the forseeable future, so worth the investment.

However current BBC standards say that no more than 25% of a HD production can be sourced from SD material, this is going to make life interesting for news programmes as there isn't much agency footage in HD around - and the SNG vans and links will need some serious upgrades. I suspect an exemption will have to be made for news, otherwise it won't be economic for many years to come.

BBC Persian

Vietnamese don't produce long form programmes so don't have a need for a long title sequence. If it does exist, it won't be out in the wild yet. The longer Turkish sequence is mainly shots of London, so I'd guess it looks the same.

The localisation for the Embedded Media Player (EMP) is slowly progressing. The playlist does already contain the correct code to invoke the Vietnamese user experience, so when the EMP team complete the work all of the exisitng published players will immediately be localised.

bbc.co.uk

BBC Russian relaunched today, after the audio stream was made available on Nokia handsets last week.

As I've mentioned before, World Service are working through relaunching the CPS language sites. So with Spanish and Russian done, that leaves Chinese and Arabic outstanding.

BBC Persian

As the comments in the Guardian article suggest, it has mixed up the BBC channel brands and services. Although BBC World News was once called BBC World Service Television it has never been run or funded by the World Service, and so its profits or loses do not affect World Service.

There never was any funding set aside for South Asia or African TV as part of the last FCO settlement, so I don't understand why these services were announced (if they ever officially were). This article confirms there is currently no funding for them.

The next settlement begins in April 2011. What happens between now and then is anyone's guess.

bbc.co.uk

I had another look at the release schedule earlier, and there isn't an dynamite release due today. Now i'm sure there was at one point, so either things have changed or I'm having a senior moment (along with the source of the story). Maybe we were getting mixed up with releases to the testing/staging/aslive environments.

Either way, we are days (rather than weeks) from the next public release, but I wouldn't be putting money on a Dr. Who Easter Special on iPlayer HD.

bbc.co.uk

Its going to be an interesting test of everyone's (BBC/ CDN Partners / ISP) infrastructure streaming files at the bitrates I've heard discussed.

Remember there has not been an official annoncement of the start date for iPlayer HD content going into public beta, so there could be some slippage from the date mentioned above. OTOH I have known for ages a release was due on the 7th as it fixes a problem with World Service iPlayer, didn't know about the HD support in this build though. Always nice to find out these things first on TVF!

bbc.co.uk

No I don't, I was expecting it yesterday. The technical challenges surrounding this launch are different, as the existing site is in News CPS, so maybe a few more days of testing and/or training are required to make sure everyone is happy with how it worls.


I think you have a point there. The Arabic branding looked very good on day one, but some aspects have not aged well at all. The new Arabic site will be built in the new branding, but I've no idea at what point TV will change. My guess is that TV won't change as the new site is launched, based on how slowly the new branding has propogated through the various platforms for WS so far.

bbc.co.uk

World Service Channel Site relaunched today, with an AAC+ stream of World Service. As the national stations are still in beta with AAC streaming this might be the first full service launch unless I'm mistaken.



Agreed that notionally these things may be internal, but the reality is different. An awful lot of people not on the BBC payrole have access to the BBC Intranet, and non BBC staff can subscribe to ariel for £1 a week if they are not able to pick up a copy from the reception of their nearest BBC building - or are lucky enough to find a copy on the Central Line among the other discarded free London evening newspapers.

I'm sure I've seen other BBC staff comments on Ariel articles here, so I'm not the only one with this view. But I'd rather agree that we take a different position on this then carry on arguing between us for 5 pages like a thread from a certain other message board.

bbc.co.uk

World Service Channel Site relaunched today, with an AAC+ stream of World Service. As the national stations are still in beta with AAC streaming this might be the first full service launch unless I'm mistaken.



Agreed that notionally these things may be internal, but the reality is different. An awful lot of people not on the BBC payrole have access to the BBC Intranet, and non BBC staff can subscribe to ariel for £1 a week if they are not able to pick up a copy from the reception of their nearest BBC building - or are lucky enough to find a copy on the Central Line among the other discarded free London evening newspapers.

I'm sure I've seen other BBC staff comments on Ariel articles here, so I'm not the only one with this view. But I'd rather agree that we take a different position on this then carry on arguing between us for 5 pages like a thread from a certain other message board.