noggin's posts, page 36

Eurovision 2021 - Netherlands - NPO/AVROTROS/NOS

Yes - there's a reason the ratings for the regular contest peak during the voting, not the performances.

Plus the EBU show was against Britain's Got Talent from 200 to 2120 - which is going to be even tougher competition.

Eurovision 2021 - Netherlands - NPO/AVROTROS/NOS

As I understand it the Eurovision Song Contest as a competition couldn't be held this year partly because of event insurance issues. AIUI some of the cancellation costs of the contest have been covered by insurance. If the EBU had hosted a competition - of any sort - that insurance would not have paid out.

Eurovision 2021 - Netherlands - NPO/AVROTROS/NOS

Yes - many European broadcasters show The Graham Norton Show (SVT in Sweden do for instance) so he is recognised worldwide. It gets a conveyor belt of A-list Hollywood guests that many other equivalent chat shows across Europe simply don't (and that's why they buy it). And as others have said - the YouTube / Social reach is much wider than the UK.

In many ways Graham's the biggest 'name' associated with Eurovision across Europe other than former performers like Abba and Celine Dion. Not that many other national broadcasters have a commentator with as big a national reputation, presenting a major TV chat show, let alone an international one like Graham.

Whilst the UK may not always be thought of as taking the contest seriously as a country, the reality is that the BBC having Sir Terry, and then Graham as their national commentators is seen by other European broadcasters as the BBC taking the actual broadcast of the contest very seriously.

He's often been the only featured commentator on previous contests - such as when he had a confetti fired into his commentary booth in Copenhagen 2014 :

Eurovision 2021 - Netherlands - NPO/AVROTROS/NOS

The Gina G sequence was not cropped - whilst the 1996 contest was a 4:3 SD show all of the song performances were shot 16:9 letterbox (so were ~430 line resolution rather than 576 lines). (This was when 16:9 production was beginning to be a thing, and there was some European - not just EU - money around for 16:9 production...)

Blowing 430 lines up to 1080 would have looked worse than YouTube I fear - so they treated it the same as the other 4:3 SD performances width-wise and masked the top and bottom rather than leaving the original black borders.

Eurovision 2021 - Netherlands - NPO/AVROTROS/NOS

It definitely felt like Graham both lifted it and gave it a bit of heart in his interview.

Eurovision 2021 - Netherlands - NPO/AVROTROS/NOS

My guess is that Germany delayed their broadcast, and some other broadcasters did what S4C sometimes do on JESC, and took longer ad breaks and then time shifted the following parts.

There were only three 2'00" ad breaks in a 2 hour show (the NikkieTutorials stuff was the break filler) - for some commercial broadcasters 3'00" an hour wouldn't have been enough...

Eurovision 2021 - Netherlands - NPO/AVROTROS/NOS

The show was live from the point you saw Graham in-vision and the voting lines open.

Doing 19 versions of a show - plus all the inevitable contingency versions for a failed vote etc. would be next to impossible to do as a pre-recorded kit of parts.

The BBC World News Thread

Yes - the galleries have dedicated Viz engines for DVE box backgrounds, full-screen still images etc. Those are cut/routed by the gallery vision mixer and are present on all outputs. For DVE boxes the Viz generating the box background is likely to be upstream keyed within an ME bank, possibly using resizers rather than a DVE, (or it could be fed into a DVE background channel if the DVE can be used independently of an ME bank, and is itself a source). There are many ways of skinning that cat on a modern mixer - and your options vary depending whether you are Sony, GVG original, GVG Kahuna etc.

Because you may need to feed things to in-vision screens as well as cutting them to air - doing all of that downstream wouldn't make sense.

Additionally there are additional overlaid Viz engines downstream of the gallery vision mixer that key on different on-screen furniture (lower thirds, flipper, clock, channel logo etc.)

The BBC World News Thread

On most vision mixers the keys on the Programme bank (i.e. PGM/PST) (the bus is the source pre-selector rather than the bank) ARE the main downstream keys in the desk. (That's certainly the case on mainstream Sony desks. You can chose to transition them on the PGM/PST transition area - or use the separate DSK transition buttons - but both actions drive the same keyers - usually 4 of them)

Upstream keys are the ones pre-keyed on ME banks, with the ME banks then being cut to on the PGM/PST bus.

It gets confusing on desks that don't have a PGM/PST, and instead have just ME banks (though often there is a 'not obvious' way of cutting each ME bank to mixer output so you don't have to nominate a fixed ME bank to be the equivalent of PGM/PST - the old GVG200 was like that) and in some 'all ME mixers' you have additional keyers downstream of those on the ME banks.

However on a conventional ME+PGM/PST mixer the keys on the PGM/PST bank ARE the downstream keyers within the mixer, though of course you can then have external devices keying downstream of the mixer, so it's entirely possible to have DSKs themselves downstream of the mixer DSKs.

HOWEVER...

On modern mixers it gets even more complicated as you can have multiple versions of the same ME bank with different keys on them, with multiple PGM outputs from the desk cutting to different versions of the same ME with the different keys on them, so when you cut to ME1 - your two main mixer outputs can cut to two different versions of ME1 with different keys on them. This is how modern sports production works. MEs and PGM/PSTS now have multiple outputs that you can configure to do splits.

Example :

You are the host broadcaster for a sports game, but are also the domestic broadcaster. You want a host broadcast generic replay wipe to go out on the host feed, but you want a station branded replay wipe to go out on the domestic feed. You want the replay wipe to transition between EVS replays on ME1. For this you configure two frame memory clip replay/ramcorders with the two different wipes. You configure the ME bank to do the transition with two ME1 outputs (one with the host broadcaster wipe keyed over, the other with the domestic wipe keyed over).

You configure the PGM/PST (or bottom row nominated ME etc.) to then cut to the ME1 output with the host broadcaster wipe on one PGM output, and to cut to the ME1 output with the domestic broadcaster wipe on another PGM output.

When you are cutting the match - you cut to ME and trigger the wipe as if you were cutting just a single feed of the match, and on a second PGM output you see the other wipe happen entirely in sync.

This is NOT what BBC News do - as they do their splits downstream of the mixer - but it is 'business as usual' when cutting sport events these days.

TV Breakdown Appreciation Thread

Technologist - you may be able to answer this...

When I was on holiday in Sweden in the mid-to-late-00s I took a DVB-T USB tuner with me and captured some quite low level information about the DVB-T transport streams and the PIDS in use, I think using TSReader. I remember being really surprised that one of them had a Teletext PID stream with "BBC Scotland" labels somewhere in it. (I was wondering if the BBC had sold off or temporarily hired some DVB text inserters for DSat to bridge the move to PQ, or if they'd sold some off and a Swedish operator had bought one...)

As that particularly DVB-T tuner and laptop had never been to Scotland or tuned a BBC Scotland DSat broadcast I was kind of intrigued...

O2 & Virgin Media To Merge

All my Amazon Echo Dots etc. and quite a few other devices that were connected to the BT Homehub via its internal 802.11ac WiFi and used its DHCP router started very regularly falling off the internet, complaining they weren't connected. Power cycling them got them back up, but they'd fall off again (often within hours). Power cycling the router improved things for a couple of days - but it started happening again. I don't know whether it was a DHCP address space thing (I hadn't hit the limit of DHCP-delivered addresses) or lease length (I didn't have clashes that I could see) - but replacing the BT HomeHub with a separate Draytek modem and Ubiquiti router and Access Point has made the same Amazon devices work pretty much trouble-free ever since.

I'd already swapped out the BT HomeHub with a spare I had - and that behaved similarly.

I sometimes have to download very large files (~50GB+) which will max out my connection - and that was also really flaky via the HomeHub (via a cabled connection). Switching to the Draytek + Ubiquiti set-up has made that a thing of the past too.

O2 & Virgin Media To Merge

I guess there are two main issues here :

1. Physical connectivity integrity (i.e. whether your RF connection to and from Virgin Media is secure and someone can't unscrew your connection or cut your cable)

2. Network connectivity (i.e. whether Virgin Media's network configuration and infrastructure provides the internet connectivity that people expect based on their local connection speeds)

There have been constant rumblings that Virgin don't engineer some aspects of their network particularly well - and run it 'hot' (so lose packets - in the expectation that lost packets will be re-requested and re-sent)

This ignores the quality, or lack thereof, of their Superhub in router and WiFi access point terms (Virgin's hubs have been hit by an Intel bug on their main SoC, which I believe is less of/not an issue if you run your Superhub as a modem only)

Anyone who cares about decent network connectivity is likely to have ditched the router and WiFi access point portions of their ISP router - and ditched their modem if they are allowed to. (We binned our BT HomeHub ages ago - replacing it with a Draytek Vigor VDSL modem and a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter-X and Ubiquiti WiFi Access Point. The Draytek is BT approved too..)