noggin's posts, page 139

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NG
noggin Founding member

Peston on Sunday to move to Wednesdays

London Lite posted:
Outside of Question Time and the main news bulletins, political shows are really only watched by the Westminster bubble and politicos.


I'd add Marr into that list too. Regularly getting more than a million on a Sunday morning isn't to be sniffed at. That's a pretty mainstream audience at that time of day.
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NG
noggin Founding member

Best practice video capturing from VHS

harshy posted:
So if I have 1920x1080i 25 content and want to convert it to 1280x720 50 aka BBC iPlayer is it best to scale it first then deinterlace it, or do it in one go?


-vf 'w3fdif=complex:all,scale=1280:720' would probably do the job in ffmpeg for native 50Hz content (that does a deinterlace and then feeds that result of the deinterlace into the scale). There are more options for scaling - and you can always use YADIF if you prefer to deinterlace, or the new one that combines YADIF and Weston.
NG
noggin Founding member

Maybe its time bbc overhaul its channels?

Jonwo87 posted:
BBC Three moving online while I didn't agree with it did make sense given who it was aimed at, BBC Four I don't think there would be any benefit moving it online.


Though the main reason BBC Three went online was that its budget was slashed so savagely it couldn't effectively run a scheduled linear service...
NG
noggin Founding member

Maybe its time bbc overhaul its channels?

Markymark posted:
Rich Tea posted:
JCB posted:
When was daytime on BBC Two never not filler? The channel has never really kicked in before 6pm. As for primetime, personally I think it's much stronger than it was 10 years ago.


I never considered Play School as "filler" when I watched it as a little boy at about 11am each morning in the 70's.



Likewise !! And the disappointment during the summer of not having Test Card F through until late afternoon, but Cricket (or some other sport), Pah !


Plus the OU or BBC Schools programmes that were on before Play School.
NG
noggin Founding member

Maybe its time bbc overhaul its channels?

Brekkie posted:
Whilst I don't want to see any more cuts to the BBC what I would like to see is for them to finally move towards a HD only future - there really should be a plan now to move away from SD and more specifically MPEG2. Yes, the regions complicate things, most notably on satellite, but the issue needs to be addressed - it feels like it hasn't moved on at all from where it was 6-8 years ago, and the only chance IMO of getting the regions on satellite in HD is closing the SD streams, and it would instantly half the mux space they need on Freeview.


The MPEG2 to H264 migration will happen when DVB-T is switched off and all terrestrial services migrate to DVB-T2. There will be no need to retain legacy MPEG2 at that point - as all DVB-T2 receivers will support H264. How you handle people who currently only have DVB-T/MPEG2 receivers will be part of that discussion I guess (just as some analogue-only viewers were when DSO happened)

Andrew posted:
You have to wonder when they will solve the HD regions issue. Yes it’s financially prohibitive for about an hour a day, but it will surely have to be tackled at some point.

I bet nobody watches The One Show in HD as nobody will remember to change from BBC One to BBC One HD after the news, and I bet that continues further into the prime time schedule.


There are two issues that are often conflated :

1. When will BBC One HD carry regional content in England?
2. When will BBC One English regional studios be running in HD?

Both are expensive, but I expect 1. will happen (with SD studios upconverted to HD) sooner than 2., but the planned approach to delivering 2. may well inform how 1. is implemented.

What is pretty clear is that the current model of feeding BBC One network to every English regional centre 24/7, and then backhauling it back 'regionalised' 24/7 for coding and muxing is unlikely to be continued in the HD era. It's much more likely that the individual regional studio outputs will be fed to a common location(s) much closer to coding and mux (in connectivity - not physical - terms) for remote opt-out switching, following a more ITV-style model. That would remove a large chunk of distribution costs, and mean the regional centres don't need to be as resilient too (bye bye the need for backup power?)...
NG
noggin Founding member

NOW TV

London Lite posted:
JamesM0984 posted:
I'd imagine a dishless Sky service to work pretty much like BT's, where you'll have to take Sky Broadband in order to use the service. In effect it'll become cable television, which Anyone who's used an IPTV service (and I mean the fly by night suppliers you pay for, rather than dodgy KODI add-ons) will have experienced the frustration you get once there's a big footy match or a major PPV fight.


Even NOW TV had major issues during football matches (and Game of Thrones) in the early days. I suspect this time round they'll want to iron out any issues before launching such a service which is premium this time round.


Yep - Now TV is a standard OTT unicast service so suffers from the same scaling issues as other OTT providers. DirecTV on Apple TV in the US uses a similar technique, but most IPTV solutions already in use in Europe that are working as 'cable replacement' systems (and in some cases appear to viewers as if they have cable) are using multicast instead of OTT.

It's also worth remembering that OTT unicast costs you 'per bit streamed' (unless you own your own CDN - which is what the BBC is doing partially - then you just pay for your own CDN infrastructure instead). If you can get multicast implemented, then you don't increase your costs for a given area as your number of viewers increases, just as with conventional broadcast.

It is - of course - possible that Sky are looking at a DirecTV-style OTT unicast solution though - which would be ISP-agnostic, but it seems a shame not to do what BT have done pretty successfully.
Last edited by noggin on 30 September 2018 3:24pm
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NG
noggin Founding member

NOW TV

JamesM0984 posted:
I'd imagine a dishless Sky service to work pretty much like BT's, where you'll have to take Sky Broadband in order to use the service. In effect it'll become cable television, which Anyone who's used an IPTV service (and I mean the fly by night suppliers you pay for, rather than dodgy KODI add-ons) will have experienced the frustration you get once there's a big footy match or a major PPV fight.


Yep - that wouldn't be an issue with UDP Multicast IPTV as it isn't delivered over the internet, and won't be sharing bandwidth (other than your individual broadband connection) with anyone else. This is why BT Broadband has few issues delivering UHD football via their broadband system, but OTT providers fall over frequently on popular live events.

With OTT you have to send individual, separate, and unique streams from CDN servers over the internet to each and every individual viewer. With a UDP multicast style solution you distribute one stream to everyone (a bit like a TV transmitter does) and that is made available at ISP level to people connected to that particular ISP, but not sent via the public internet in the same way.
NG
noggin Founding member

Peston on Sunday to move to Wednesdays

chris posted:
noggin posted:
watchingtv posted:


Hmm - comparing an ITV show with a BBC Two show - wouldn't you expect ITV to do better irrespective of content? It will have bigger inheritance and is the more 'mainstream' channel. Be just as interesting to compare Peston with Question Time (different days but similar slots on the two mainstream networks)?

Question Time got 1.9m 2245-2345 / 23.4% share on Thursday
Peston got 0.5m 2245-2345 / 6.8% share on Wednesday
(Figures I have may not match other quoted figures - as sources may round differently or report slightly differently)

If you want to compare two mainstream channel shows covering politics etc. - that feels like a fair comparison...


This strikes me as a desperate attempt by the BBC to disguise the fact that Newsnight has been performing terribly in recent years.

Even if we were to take the inheritance argument, Question Time should perform that well or even better, with BBC News attracting 4x the viewers of ITV at 10.


For completeness then :

BBC Two Wednesday
2200-2230 Motherland 300,000 / 2.5%
2230-2315 Newsnight 300,000 / 3.4%
(So BBC Two built in share terms and retained inheritance)

ITV Wednesday
2200-2230 News at Ten 1.6m / 12.1%
2230-2245 ITV Local News 1.1m / 9.6%
2245-2345 Peston 500,00 / 6.8%
(So ITV share dropped by ~ 30% and there lost more than 50% volume of their inherited audience)

BBC One Thursday
2200-2230 BBC News at Ten 3.1m/ 22.9%
2230-2245 BBC Local News 2.7m / 23%
2245-2345 Question Time 1.9m / 23.4%
(So QT actually increased their share a tiny bit compared to the previous two shows, and lost only around 30% volume of their inherited audience)
2345-0040 This Week 600,000 / 16.1%
This Week - which airs an hour later than Peston still got 100,000 more audience and a share more than double Peston's.

Sure - you can absolutely question Newsnight's audiences and relative merit - but Peston's ratings aren't setting the world on fire for mainstream current affairs either.
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NG
noggin Founding member

Changes to BBC Parliament & Political Programming

RDJ posted:
Network announcement acknowledging BBC One HD showing Sunday Politics Midlands. Also played out in the Midlands too which caused a bit of confusion.

Patrick acknowledged the whole country watching on BBC One HD at the start of the show. Also seems to be going out live for once too.


Yep - it's much trickier to handle this situation for live shows than for Inside Out (where network will have their own copy of the show to Playout on BBC One HD, and the regions can continue to opt-out as normal and do local presentation - even in the region playing out the show on BBC One HD)

For a live show - this isn't so easy - the neatest and safest solution if you want bespoke local presentation and to avoid a network howl round or crashed idents is to run two galleries to get the local show on-air.

The output of the main gallery feeds BBC One HD Playout AND the a local presentation gallery, with the main gallery starting the show at an agreed time. This would require someone to staff the presentation gallery (but probably only one person). It would avoid the nightmare of the region having to crash opt (you can't safely line-up and soft-opt if you are feeding yourself back down to Network) and also remove the chance of network clipping your local ident.

Not all regions still have two galleries - but many do - and that would be a neat way of solving the issue I'd imagine?
NG
noggin Founding member

NOW TV

London Lite posted:
noggin posted:

Longer term it will be interesting to see how Sky's OTT and IPTV offerings develop. We still haven't seen the IPTV 'dishless Sky' launch yet.


That could be why 1080p hasn't launched on NOW TV yet as both would certainly use a similar set-up with regards to streaming at that resolution.


Not sure. I'd thought Dishless-Sky was more likely to be multicast UDP IPTV (maybe even CBR) and not delivered over the internet, just via broadband, than an internet-delivered HLS or DASH-based TCP/http OTT service - so pretty different.

I'd expect 'Dishless-Sky' to be 1080i too (like BTTV's IPTV multicast service - and most of those already running in Europe that aren't 720p50) - not 1080p unless something odd happens.

In broadcast 1080p is a bit of a non-issue - as very few, if any, channel Playout areas are 1080p-based. In the UK we're based around 576i, 1080i and 2160p, but no 1080p is really used. Similarly the DPP AS11 TX masters for UK shows will be 1080i (sure they may contain 1080p25 content, but that will be delivered 1080i25 wrapped, and all UK HD Playout areas are likely to be 1080i based)

There would be no real need to convert an IPTV service from 1080i to 1080p - that's really only an issue for OTT services that can't expect deinterlacing functionality on their destinations (phones, tablets, PCs etc.)
Last edited by noggin on 29 September 2018 6:39pm
UKnews and London Lite gave kudos
NG
noggin Founding member

Maybe its time bbc overhaul its channels?

fanoftv posted:
Does older content cost more to show? I remember hearing Christopher Biggins say that every time an episode of Porridge is shown on BBC One or BBC Two (that he featured in) he receives a royalty payment, though he doesn’t if it’s on Gold or any other channel; these payments must come from somewhere and I expect there are similar terms with other old programmes.


Yes - rights for talent (actors, writers, musicians etc.), archive, stills etc. were negotiated in a different way to now, and in some cases the costs of repeating older shows can be prohibitive. The BBC renegotiated a rights deal with Equity (actors union) a while back I think - which changed the payment model (as a reduced fee you actually get paid is better than a high fee you don't I guess) and allowed the Afternoon Classics strand to happen.
NG
noggin Founding member

NOW TV

Hulu is a strong brand in the US, so I'd be surprised if that were ditched. The rights agreements around content on Hulu in the US mean it's unlikely we'll get the same service in Europe any time soon - but I could see them rebranding NowTV to Hulu if they think the NowTV brand isn't hugely valuable in consumer loyalty and brand awareness terms?

Longer term it will be interesting to see how Sky's OTT and IPTV offerings develop. We still haven't seen the IPTV 'dishless Sky' launch yet.