noggin's posts, page 73

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NG
noggin Founding member

BBC One English Regions opt outs

Po6xyPop77 posted:
When BBC One originally launched on Sky, it only had four regions - England 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 (also available for the Channel Islands), Wales 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿, Northern Ireland 🇮🇪 and Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿, and you could only view one (depending on the post code of your viewing card). They would air UK Today and, in England, tell people to press TV then 1 for their local news. BBC Two was entirely national until 2002-2004-ish but the BBC Choice regions could be viewed anywhere. Yeah, Myina did her research Wink


Technically BBC One Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are Nations, not Regions.
Po6xyPop77, denton and dvboy gave kudos
NG
noggin Founding member

Peacock ....

London Lite posted:
noggin posted:
Mouseboy33 posted:
What stripped down box are you referring to? Could you clarify?


I'm assuming that refers to a NowTV-type device, as sold in the UK.

Sky got Roku (who they partially own, and now I guess NBC Comcast partially own via the Sky merger) to engineer custom, cut-down, Roku boxes and sticks specifically branded for their Now-TV service, which are sold at a very low cost. (One of them included a DVB-T2 tuner for OTA reception along with OTT access, though I'm not sure that's currently offered)


That model has been discontinued and replaced with the Now TV 4K box which removes the DVB-T2 tuner. It was always a clunky integration.


Yes - the lack of Freeview licensing was an issue (no more than Now and Next EPG on DVB-T2 services because of the proprietary Freeview-licensed Huffman encoding)
NG
noggin Founding member

Peacock ....

Mouseboy33 posted:
DVB Cornwall posted:
, it will be interesting to see whether in Roku's main market there's a demand for a stripped down Roku device, I think not unless the box marketing is such that it matches the early NOW ultra cheap offering with passes thrown in. The third parties signed up to distribute will be key.

What stripped down box are you referring to? Could you clarify?


I'm assuming that refers to a NowTV-type device, as sold in the UK.

Sky got Roku (who they partially own, and now I guess NBC Comcast partially own via the Sky merger) to engineer custom, cut-down, Roku boxes and sticks specifically branded for their Now-TV service, which are sold at a very low cost. (One of them included a DVB-T2 tuner for OTA reception along with OTT access, though I'm not sure that's currently offered)

The NowTV stick starts at £15, and at one point you could get boxes for as low as £5 with special offers.
NG
noggin Founding member

BBC to switch off red button text

The irony is that you can run these Level 2.5 text services into many UK TVs now and they decode them fine, as do the built in teletext decoders in some free-to-air satellite receivers. Although take-up across Europe has been very low, manufacturers did start to implement them.

With a Raspberry Pi and the right software you can get your Pi to output, via the composite video output (on a phone on the first gen models and then on a 3.5mm composite+audio jack on more recent models, or a PCB header on the Zeros), teletext in vertical blanking with no additional hardware. This includes Level 2.5 support Smile There's quite a scene involved in 'DIY Teletext' - including people taking the BBC News website RSS feeds etc. and creating 'CEEFAX' from them - though the retirement of Digital Text may mean that the end of headline character limits make this trickier.
NG
noggin Founding member

BBC to switch off red button text

Rkolsen posted:
Was there any way for the at home viewer to view presfax?


If you had a PresFax decoder - yes. But only BBC employees could have them. (Rumour has it the head of BBC Broadcast did have one at her home)

Reality is that no member of the public did. Nobody really got into this stuff until software recovery became possible, and because of the way PresFax was broadcast in the teletext stream it's more difficult to recover from VHS than regular pages. (The same goes for the trialled 'audio in VBI' that was used for Audio Description and Talkback tests)
NG
noggin Founding member

BBC to switch off red button text

Yes - Level 2 or 2.5 was used, and broadcast, for Pages from CEEFAX. People have successfully recovered and decoded the data from those pages.

Teletext soldiers on across Europe on DVB services in Germany, Scandinavia, and I think France, Italy and Spain. ZDF in Germany have a subtle Level 2 or 2.5 element or two - such as a different colour and rounded logo that can't be implemented with standard teletext.

As for why italics etc. haven't arrived for subtitles - this is because although DVB Subtitles are nice and clever bitmaps (like Blu-ray and DVD subtitles), the internal systems that route them around in HD-SDI video are largely still based on WST Teletext and so have the same colour and character limitations they always have (and Sky still broadcast subtitles in that format)
NG
noggin Founding member

The five main PSBs switching to 14:9

thegeek posted:
Steve Williams posted:

I definitely reckon there were just as many extended studio refurbs and temporary set-ups in the past.

Didn't News 24 spend quite some time in a CSO studio when they were changing from the red and cream mothership to the smoked glass look in N8? I seem to remember the recorded background wasn't quite long enough and the same person would appear on a fairly regular basis.


There was a period in the early-to-mid 00s when TC10 (aka N1) was the temporary home to an all-CSO News 24 operation for a number of weeks.
NG
noggin Founding member

Whatever happened to...................?

The SNT Three posted:
Worzel posted:
Sasha Herriman (ITV News)


Sasha Herriman went to CNN for a while, but now seems to work as a singer, theatre director and teacher.

On the topic of Look East/Anglia presenters, Stephen Lee left Anglia News in 2008 and moved to Australia where he has worked as a producer for Ten and SBS (link).


And is a Wedding Celebrant (as his wikipedia entry says I see!)
NG
noggin Founding member

Brexitcast - The TV Show

Brekkie posted:
BBC4 only screen the Proms on Fridays now, and BBC2 only show a couple all summer. I'm sure BBC4 used to screen them all in it's early days, or at least they were on the red button.


No - only selected Proms have ever been broadcast on TV.

Orchestras and artists performing at the Proms are only contracted for their radio and live rights as standard - with TV rights costing an additional amount, which in some cases can be a very large amount... The costs of buying out TV rights to every single Prom performance would be massive.
NG
noggin Founding member

Brexitcast - The TV Show

Brekkie posted:
Obviously the BBC have preferred the latter, even though doing the former would surely help bring down the average audience age for the channel.

In reality - possibly - but in BARB terms, remember that BARB only registers viewers aged 4 and over Smile

Quote:

If it wasn't for the need for a place other than BBC1 for occassional live daytime sport I suspect one of the childrens channels would have moved to the BBC2 space after the closure of BBC3. CBBC and CBeebies are too successful to mess with but really do think the BBC would benefit from the more flexible scheduling options a traditional linear channel offers and rolling the kids content into the daytime hours of BBC2 and a new full time "BBC3" (replacing BBC4) would make quite a bit of sense.


It's vital that kids content remains in the kids section of the EPG though, so closing one of the channels would not be sensible.
NG
noggin Founding member

The five main PSBs switching to 14:9

Steve in Pudsey posted:

Either that or they had two sets of the virtual kit, from when World had the same look. Could the spare have been set up in TC2 etc?


Sorry - missed that point. Very unlikely that would have been possible. N1 and N2 - the old 6th floor News studios used by the 'Virtual' blue BBC One and BBC World news bulletins up until that point were PAL analogue composite - and N6 and TC7 (like N8 and N9) were Serial Digital Component. The CRV laser disc players are likely to have been re-used, and it's also probably that the Charismas were too. However the upstream keyers were definitely not re-used (N6 had a pile of Crystal Vision SDI chroma keyers installed)

Also - I'm not sure BBC World News had moved out of N1 at that point (though this is 20 years ago...) News 24 was in N9 until November 1998 (when they moved into N8 ), and then there was a period of training and set installation in N9 before BBC World moved in?
Last edited by noggin on 14 September 2019 4:22pm
NG
noggin Founding member

The five main PSBs switching to 14:9

Steve in Pudsey posted:
Or could they have done all the weekend bulletins from another studio (TC2?) against a big blue background? Pre key each camera with the appropriate chunk of the virtual background and keep the cameras static, nobody would have known the difference.

Either that or they had two sets of the virtual kit, from when World had the same look. Could the spare have been set up in TC2 etc?


The cameras had to be static on-shot with that look anyway - as it wasn't actually VR (hence 'virtual' in quotes).

All movement on-shot was largely done by static shots fed into Charisma DVE which ran moves slaved to CRV Laserdisc pre-rendered backdrops (two discs slaved with key and fill in some cases)
Ian of old and Steve in Pudsey gave kudos