noggin's posts, page 276

Sky / Discovery Dispute

I disagree. This is a very significant dispute. Subscribers paying Sky for access to Eurosport need to be aware they will lose the channel unless they make their views clear. I don't see it as unprofessional at all.



Very different situation - the BBC are not being removed from a platform through a funding disagreement in the same way - and their funding is set by government, not through commercial agreements with a monopoly operator.

Sky / Discovery Dispute

Why do people think that the Sky thing has anything to do with Virgin accessing the feeds?

I'd be surprised if the feeds to Virgin's main headend areas weren't fibre these days. Don't see any need for satellite. AIUI you dont have to be downlinked in every town for Virgin these days (not like the old days of individual cable companies in each region). Virgin have centralised head-end operations and fibre distribution TO their nodes, and expect most channels to be delivered over fibre (well the mainstream ones)

AIUI the main terrestrials deliver an uncompressed HD-SDI quality fibre feed to Virgin. Wouldn't be at all surprised if Sky, Discovery etc. didn't do similarly. (Cable in Ireland may be a different kettle of fish)

Sky / Discovery Dispute

Totally disagree. That was probably their audience peak for the day. If you want to make sure the largest number of people know about it - that's precisely the time to discuss it.

Sky / Discovery Dispute

I'd be really surprised if Discovery cared so little about their picture quality that their main feed to Virgin was a Sky off-air. Virgin wouldn't be too happy either.

Sky's off-air is low bitrate 4:2:0 H264 at <15Mbs. You REALLY don't want to re-encode that to MPEG2 or H264 again at those kind of bitrates on demanding content like sport... (And historically Virgin had to run all their HD channels MPEG2 - so couldn't just pass through the stream without transcoding to MPEG2)

For info - the general rule of thumb when concatenating encoding processes is - everything else being equal (and it isn't always) - you need twice the upstream bitrate to your downstream bitrate to transcode with the SAME codec and avoid too many picture quality issues. This doesn't scale (you get diminishing returns at high bitrates) - but it is why broadcast uplinks from OBs are so much higher bitrate than what we receive at home. (38Mbs H264 isn't uncommon)

Broadcasting House, Salford Quays & TVC

Depends what you mean by 'infrastructure'. If you mean cabling and apps bay rooms - then yes.

However most broadcast installs will use a mix of split physical networks and VLANs to keep 'business' IT (basic connectivity for office PCs), VOIP (usually on separate VLANs to PCs), broadcast post-gear (desktop edits, graphic workstations moving video around as files), broadcast video (SDI over IP - which is usually 10GigE rather than 1Gig and using real-time protocols) and broadcast control (which is the control network for stuff like routers, up-/down-converters, PGs, multiviewers, colour correctors, networked IP KVMs for remote control of devices with PC-style user interfaces) etc.

There can be bridges enabled between these networks - say by implementing shared access to storage (so business IT can access the same networked storage as the post-prod IT systems to allow easy sharing of media) - but the core infrastucture is usually kept as physically and virtually as separate as it can be to increase robustness.

You'll also often find totally isolated (in both physical and logical terms) local networks for some equipment - say connecting a VM mixer top to a crate. (Though in some installs this will be on a broadcast network - so you can upload/download clips and stills to the VM)

Now we're pumping HD-SDI level uncompressed video across networks, you are in the realms of separate, much higher spec, cabling, patches, switches etc. to that required for office PCs and Phones (many of which are still 100Mbs let alone 10GbE) It's still really common to see an office PC connected to a VOIP phone, and then the VOIP phone connected to a floorbox for network connectivty. The PC and Phone are on different VLANs but share a physical connection back to the patch and switch. The inbuilt switch in the phone is often 100Mbs only.

Sky / Discovery Dispute

I'd hope it's a line feed from playout these days. Think this is Virgin's preferred route for obvious reasons (re-encoding a low bitrate Sky off-air would not be a great idea...)


No - the European feeds won't neccessarily be OK in editorial and rights terms for the UK.

I would imagine that adding a ticker downstream and recording cable and DSat variants separately for Ofcom purposes would be relatively straightforward. It may even be done already.

Sky TV to go satellite dish-free in 2018

I'd have said the opposite. Rural areas are usually easy to install satellite in (open skies, larger, often detached, usually single occupancy, houses etc.), it's urban areas that are trickier. If you are in an urban environment shaded by a large building, don't have suitable south-facing positions to mount a dish, or live in a large block of flats that doesn't have a communal distribution system that's suitable, or live in a conservation area, or have a landlord who won't allow dishes, then IP could be good news.

I'd say this may actually be better for urban areas - though fibre connectivity can also be hit and miss too.


No - but there are currently groups of people who can't use a dish, so it may well appeal to them.

Also - if Sky can migrate more content to IP, they can reduce their pretty hefty satellite transponder bill. I can see IPTV being added to DSat Sky Q boxes with Sky hubs too - in the same way Freeview Connect has added capacity to Freeview using IP.

Good Morning Britain

I think both David Bond and Mihir Bose had print backgrounds, and both were sports editors.

However Andrew Marr and Robert Peston are also former print journalists and successfully made the move (though Andrew Marr tried it before less successfully ISTR)

What's this port on a Virgin remote?

Suspect it is a JTAG or similar port for reflashing firmware. Chances are the remote is reasonably generic, and can be flashed with different remote codes for different territories, applications, or boxes. Lots of remote chipsets are quite generic.

Pretty certain my One4All remotes have similar connectors on them. Could well be a way of adding new TV codes (if the remote also can be programmed to control your TV) as time goes by during the manufacturing process, so the same design of remote can be shipped with newer codes over the months/years it is in manufacture.

Broadcasting House, Salford Quays & TVC

Here's hoping that's an architect's impression... White has no place in gallery decor... (SVT take note...)

Sky TV to go satellite dish-free in 2018

No - think there was a lack of ISP buy-in. It cost them money but didn't generate revenue...

Of course, if the ISP themselves are providing the multicast service for payment... Different situation.

Sky / Discovery Dispute

Yep - Virgin will get a high quality feed of most channels (to allow them to do a high quality local compression without concatenation), rather than just rebroadcasting an off-air (which has already been heavily compressed by the originating platform operator/broadcast uplink).