noggin's posts, page 177

Interesting and unusual uses of teletext

Ah - I thought there were STBs that did 708 to 608 conversion at one point to allow for TV rather than STB decoding ? These would only work on SD outputs (same issue with DVB teletext, which can be re-inserted into an SD VBI for analogue SD output and display decoding, but has to be receiver decoded and burned into video for HD HDMI outputs)

Royal Wedding - Harry & Meghan

AIUI the BBC will be providing a host feed, with third parties buying in access to it. Sky regularly buy into the BBC's coverage, and has co-operated with helicopter sharing, ITV usually complain a bit but then also buy in.

AIUI the BBC host feed this year will be UHD HLG HDR, with Sky showing it in UHD SDR (don't think Sky support HDR yet), and given that the BBC recently tested UHD HLG HDR live-streaming on iPlayer I wouldn't bet against it being on iPlayer.

Sky News | General Discussion

I expect this will also be the case for BBC iPlayer, and the BBC feed may also be in HLG HDR (something Sky Q doesn't yet support AIUI)?

The BBC trialled a UHD HLG HDR livestream recently - in readiness for a summer of iPlayer UHD HDR content trials. (Royal Wedding, World Cup, Wimbledon are all mooted I believe). You'll need pretty decent broadband for the highest quality streams as they are likely to be well over 30Mbs I believe.

Going Underground

Are Virgin now delivering fibre-to-the-premises?

Virgin's Fibre broadband is still - usually - fibre-to-the-cabinet AIUI with DOCSIS over Coax used for the local loop. (European DOCSIS carries IP download data modulated onto regular DVB-C muxes, with more muxes being dedicated to you the more bandwidth you pay for)

Effectively Virgin uses DOCSIS for broadband-over-coax in the way BT Infinity uses VDSL for broadband-over-phone lines. (Both are described as fibre - but there isn't a fibre connection to the premises, in the way that suppliers like Hyperoptic and Gigaclear provide. Though BT are now rolling out a FTTP product I didn't know Virgin were.)

Going Underground

They had 16:9 capable gear (modified Beta SP decks), and I think they had a widescreen telecine for movie transfer. If anything was 16:9 it would have been movies I expect. AIUI the telecine was also used for 16:9 transfers for the C4 Pal Plus trials?

NBC News, MSNBC, CNBC, NBC affiliates and TODAY

Have to agree. The content may be great, but the set doesn't do anything for me at all. Dark and dated.

Going Underground

In the late 80s, Cable was still quite underdeveloped in the UK. I moved around quite a lot in the UK in the late 80s and early 90s, and lived in large towns and smaller cities. Not ONE of my houses or flats had cable TV passing them. That was over a 10 year period where I lived in around 10 different properties. Satellite was available to all of them (and installed in 4)

I think people underestimate how minor cable was in the UK back in the day.

Also - BSB's selling point was improved picture quality and widescreen. Analogue cable negated both of them.

Jeremy Vine on 5

Given that ITN only won the tender relatively recently, I suspect they'll need to re-cast within the existing contract?

Interesting and unusual uses of teletext

No - though a number of US stations ran services in the early 80s. Most used the 525/60 version of WST (i.e. the same system used in the UK modified for NTSC) - and I think TBS in particular ran a service. Zenith made TVs that had decoders, but when they re-engineered to add stereo functionality to their range, the teletext functionality was dropped, as by then it was clear it was going nowhere.

Some other stations in North America used a different system - NABTS (North American Broadcast Text Service) - which I think was originated in Canada and may have been linked to the French Antiope service a bit (France had their own bespoke teletext standard for a number of years before switching to WST).

Subtitles (aka Closed Captions) in North America are delivered using a separate system (much cruder, but also more robust, so it survived VHS recording) and the V-Chip system was integrated into this standard AIUI.



Yes - you could use as many lines as you liked with some WST decoders, allowing a much faster page access and bigger carousels. ISTR Reuters had a ring-main system that included full-screen teletext that allowed for very fast access to a lot of dealing room/markets data.

Other data-over-video standards have been used over the years. The Sony F1 system carried digital stereo audio over a vision circuit, and allowed digital audio to be recorded to VHS or Betamax. There was a similar system used for UMatic 3/4" industrial tape that was a key part of CD mastering for many years.

There were also systems that let you use VHS tapes for PC file backup in the days before CD-R/DVD-R recorders.

There were also other data formats used alongside CEEFAX in the UK. The BBC sold off some of its VBI space to allow for Datacast, which was used to broadcast price lists to shops like Dixons (in the days before broadband connectivity), and ISTR that PresFax (in a number of incarnations) sent data in blanking (though I think the final iteration of PresFax actually sent packets in the general CEEFAX stream that only PresFax decoders bothered with) (PresFax carried junction data to the English regions, with the original version also carrying junction scripts AIUI)

Royal Birth

Yes - plus Louis is the first male prince not to usurp his older female sibling at birth since the rules of primogeniture were scrapped.

Cliff Richard High Court Case

Invasion of Privacy is quite a tricky thing to define though. We haven't, historically, had many privacy laws in the UK. My understanding is that most current privacy law is based on interpretation of Human Rights legislation not specific privacy rights.

ITV abandons the South Bank

Yes - shows are booking much further in advance than they used to have to, to ensure capacity for their show is available.

Riverside can't re-open soon enough...