noggin's posts, page 88

15,946 search results, most recent first

NG
noggin Founding member

Will BBC World News become available in UK?

Inspector Sands posted:
noggin posted:
Steve in Pudsey posted:
Did the alleged "core feed" exist in the days when there was a breakfiller played out for those regions which didn't opt out for adverts?


Yes - and at one point I think the adverts were inserted outside of the BBC - so a core feed did exist. When the BBC started playing out multiple regional variants I think this changed.


There is a 'core' or master version of World News and I'm fairly certain that it's ad free (I've never seen one on it). However I'm not sure what they do with sponsorship, if there is any. Years ago on one of the two occasions when World went out on BBC1 (the night of the bomb)the nightshift in playout had to cover sponsorship bumpers as they were still on it

But yes those were the days when it was a single version (albeit in 625 and 525 formats) and outside companies inserted their ads. Then they added Europe and eventually all the other streams. I think there are some partners around the world that still insert ads, hence the master.

Even if they wanted an ad free version and there wasn't one already its wouldn't be that difficult to do, they already have 5 or 6 variants


Very happy to be corrected Smile
NG
noggin Founding member

HD remastering 4:3 programmes

Markymark posted:

Well, some of the recovered from telerecordings Dad’s Armys have ended up with the outdoor native film sequences ‘fluidised’ ( made up word) as part of the recovery process


That's unusual and definitely unintentional. The team behind the VidFire-ing of Doctor Who, Dads Army etc. are usually incredibly careful to only restore material originally shot on video to a 'video look' and leave the location film sequences alone (and thus retaining their 25p look)

The same team also collaborate on the colour recovery from B&W telerecordings of colour content where the subcarrier dots have survived and can be used to restore colour.
NG
noggin Founding member

Will BBC World News become available in UK?

Steve in Pudsey posted:
Did the alleged "core feed" exist in the days when there was a breakfiller played out for those regions which didn't opt out for adverts?


Yes - and at one point I think the adverts were inserted outside of the BBC - so a core feed did exist. When the BBC started playing out multiple regional variants I think this changed.

Quote:

If it was simple to produce an ad-free version - and the incident involving a sponsored bumper going out on BBC One when Breakfast took World News during a fire alarm in Salford suggests it is a tad more complex - then I see no reason not to make it available on the BBC News app for connected TVs. The appropriateness of expecting UK license payers to fund a service we can't see is questionable, and there is some form of precedent in World Service Radio being availabe on digital platforms in the UK.


Where is the licence fee funding? BBC World News is a commercially funded channel that doesn't cost the licence fee payer anything AIUI (unless the channel is making a heavy loss) In many ways this is the same as BBC Brit, BBC Knowledge, BBC Entertainment etc. They aren't provided in the UK either (though are run by BBC Studios - was Worldwide)...

BBC World Service Radio has always been available (and is commercial free) via analogue (648kHz covered a lot of the UK) and IS now largely licence fee funded (previously it was grant in aid funded by the Foreign Office).
NG
noggin Founding member

Global Radio axes all regional/local breakfast shows

Markymark posted:
Orry Verducci posted:
buster posted:
Much as I think DAB+ is the way forward, it is a shame that old DAB radios (which still make up a significant part of DAB listening) still show the stations as available but are then silent when you select them. It's quite a bad listener experience so I can see why they've been cautious. (for comparison, if your Freeview box doesn't do DVB-T2 channels, you're not even aware they exist).

DAB+ also seems to be heavily affected by the standard of the processing, more so than DAB to my ears. The Virgin DAB+ stations sound pretty metallic to me, like an old Real Player stream that hadn't got up to speed. Some others of the same bitrate aren't so bad. The new Global D1 stations (admittedly slightly higher bitrate) sound not bad at all. (and also it's a big relief to see Global so far using DAB+ to deliver stereo, rather than just cram in more stations)

While there is an issue with older DAB radios, of which there are still a few around, I would argue they no longer take up a significant part of listening. Thankfully Europe and Australia have been using DAB+ entirely much longer than we have, so radios have been compatible for quite some time now. Certainly all the car radios and adapters I've come across are DAB+ compatible, and I know some of the older Pure radios are software upgradable to enable DAB+.


The metallic sounding audio is entirely down to the ridiculously low bitrates being used as VMPhil suggested. You'll notice the stations using 24kbps (i.e. BFBS) sound particularly bad. The standard itself with the right bitrates can sound very good as it's just AAC audio, same as used for HD TV, downloaded music and online videos. Ideally they should be no lower than 48kbps for stereo broadcasting, but 64kbps would be best. Hopefully when we reach a point where all stations are DAB+ encoded they'll increase all the bitrates rather than trying to cram in another 10 stations, as overly compressed audio is the one thing really letting DAB in this country down.

The Global stations sound a bit better as they've made the sensible decision to use a 32khz sampling rate instead of the 44.1khz rate normally used, which means they're not trying to cram as much audio data in the limited bandwidth. The downside is you lose any audio frequencies above 16khz, but most people won't really notice that. The DAB+ stations on the SDL mux sadly haven't had the same idea.


The metallic sound on low bit rate DAB+ stations is also due to synthesised content, that ‘papers over the significant cracks’. It’s an extra 8kb/s layer. On some receivers it takes a second or so for this second layer to lock up, and you hear the raw unenhanced signal, that sounds like a bad phone line


Yes - and there are a very few DAB+ receivers that don't use the additional layer/stream in SBR I believe?
NG
noggin Founding member

Will BBC World News become available in UK?

Gallunach posted:
ALV posted:
Well, it's technically available in the UK... If your home has a satellite dish, you can point it to Hotbird 13B (13.0°E) or Astra 4A (4.8°E) and tune it to their respective frequency to receive the European feed of the channel. (Go to lyngsat.com for frequency details)... I'm not sure if the core feed is available on satellite or it's only available to the BBC privately.


Could they not let it go out on Astra but not on Sky EPG or Freesat EPG


What would be the commercial reason for the BBC to pay the large amount of money to put it on Astra 28.2 - which is a slot used almost exclusively for services aimed at UK and Ireland - if the channel were not broadcast in the UK (and thus there was no advertising revenue generated by this slot)?
NG
noggin Founding member

How strange (odd choices in news programmes)

Rkolsen posted:
noggin posted:
Rkolsen posted:

It’s even easier now with automation. I believe in certain areas the NRK does self op with VizRT and there’s a case study online of a local media company that outputs two channels for different areas in France where they use Ross OverDrive.


NRK regional TV doesn't use VizRT or Mosart. They use an in-house open source system called Sofie, which has been developed by some of the people who worked on Caspar at SVT (and are now running their own consultancy)

Sofie integrates with ENPS using MOS, and controls Caspar for Playout, lower third captions, screen graphics etc., and has Black Magic and (I think) Lawo vision and sound mixer automation control, along with PTZ camera control and lighting control. It's effectively an Open Source Mosart-lite.

https://github.com/nrkno/Sofie-TV-automation

AIUI they have had presenters drive their own automation for short bulletins (or possibly to pre-record web stuff)

As of last year they were deploying Mozart. https://www.tvtechnology.com/news/mosart-to-supply-newscast-automation-for-16-nrk-stations
And here’s the article of a region where the anchor operates Mozart... https://www.mosart.me/news/71/nrk-in-norway-just-turned-the-anchor-into-a-viz-mosart-operator


I guess they changed tack and switched to their in-house Open Source system (which they have developed with internal effort alongside a consultancy called SuperFly). Mosart is a very expensive solution, and for shorter regional news bulletins may be a sledge-hammer to crack a nut compared to Sofie.

I believe NRK use Mosart for their national broadcasts, but it's very clear that they've rolled out Sofie for their regional ones.

Here's the NRK Beta article on Sofie being used in its first region last year : https://nrkbeta.no/2018/09/10/nrk-har-utviklet-egen-og-apen-teknologi-for-a-sende-nyheter-pa-tv/

Google translate here if you don't understand Norwegian : https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=no&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fnrkbeta.no%2F2018%2F09%2F10%2Fnrk-har-utviklet-egen-og-apen-teknologi-for-a-sende-nyheter-pa-tv%2F

They talk in the article about it being more cost effective to write local drivers for new equipment than wait for a commercial company to add that functionality to their product. That sounds like a swipe at Mosart to me.

Here's Jonas Hummelstrand who is one of the people behind Superfly who worked with NRK developing Sofie doing a quick presentation at the EBU Open Source Meet Up at IBC :


(Vignett = titles or opening sequence)

He talks about Sofie being developed in 27 weeks (24 weeks including vacation) from March 2018 to deployment in September 2018. I think it was initially deployed in a region that was relocating buildings, but has since rolled out elsewhere.

Jonas is a former senior graphic designer at SVT - which may explain why Sofie has such a nicely designed and delivered UI.

NRK announced that they were going to massively reduce the duration of their longest local news bulletins, so effectively no bulletin was much longer than 5'00" (with an argument that more local stories would run on the national news and online) but there was a major backlash when this was announced and they had to agree to keep the evening regional news bulletins to a longer duration. (That may have influenced the change)
Last edited by noggin on 13 June 2019 9:01am - 10 times in total
NG
noggin Founding member

TV Panel spying on your viewing

I got what looked like an MHEG5 pop-up on London Live when watching via DVB-T a week or so ago about viewer panels or similar. (Sony TV)
NG
noggin Founding member

How strange (odd choices in news programmes)

Rkolsen posted:
noggin posted:
WW Update posted:
Here's an odd arrangement from CityTV in Toronto; the anchor of this 1991 overnight update is essentially his own technical director, zooming in cameras, switching feeds, etc.:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVeknDE0f4Q



It was perfectly routine for the daytime regional news (and early Breakfast opts) bulletins to be self-opped by the presenter (though the desk they were using was usually out of vision) In some regions this continued to be the case when Breakfast opts included VT, and some regions also did this for their 2128 bulletin after the 9 O'Clock News.


It’s even easier now with automation. I believe in certain areas the NRK does self op with VizRT and there’s a case study online of a local media company that outputs two channels for different areas in France where they use Ross OverDrive.


NRK regional TV doesn't use VizRT or Mosart. They use an in-house open source system called Sofie, which has been developed by some of the people who worked on Caspar at SVT (and are now running their own consultancy)

Sofie integrates with ENPS using MOS, and controls Caspar for Playout, lower third captions, screen graphics etc., and has Black Magic and (I think) Lawo vision and sound mixer automation control, along with PTZ camera control and lighting control. It's effectively an Open Source Mosart-lite.

https://github.com/nrkno/Sofie-TV-automation

AIUI they have had presenters drive their own automation for short bulletins (or possibly to pre-record web stuff)
NG
noggin Founding member

Global Radio axes all regional/local breakfast shows

TVEngineer posted:
Orry Verducci posted:
The downside is you lose any audio frequencies above 16khz, but most people won't really notice that.


Worth remembering that FM Radio has an upper limit of 15kHz.


Yes - BBC Radio is distributed to the FM transmitters using NICAM 32kHz sampled 14:10bit companded audio (very similar audio specs to the TV NICAM 728 system used for digital audio on analogue TV, and the audio system used in D-/D2-MAC analogue component systems)

As a result BBC FM radio has the same audio sample rate/bandwidth limitations as 32kHz sampled DAB+ (plus an analogue transmission path, but without any digital compression over and above the 14:10 companding)
Orry Verducci, UKnews and London Lite gave kudos
NG
noggin Founding member

Good Morning Britain

Jay Lee posted:
natoswald posted:




I expect by 'rating' he means share..


It's a shame we don't know how BBC Breakfast fared. Dan Walker curiously silent. Historic lows now that there's so much anti-BBC sentiment across the UK?


Tuesday 11th :
Breakfast 1.4m 39.9% share
Good Morning Britain 0.8m 24.6% share

For comparison - the Tuesday the week before :

Tuesday 4th
Breakfast 1.4m 40.2% share
Good Morning Britain 0.8m 24.6% share

Huge changes there...
NG
noggin Founding member

How strange (odd choices in news programmes)

WW Update posted:
Here's an odd arrangement from CityTV in Toronto; the anchor of this 1991 overnight update is essentially his own technical director, zooming in cameras, switching feeds, etc.:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVeknDE0f4Q



It was perfectly routine for the daytime regional news (and early Breakfast opts) bulletins to be self-opped by the presenter (though the desk they were using was usually out of vision) In some regions this continued to be the case when Breakfast opts included VT, and some regions also did this for their 2128 bulletin after the 9 O'Clock News.
NG
noggin Founding member

HD remastering 4:3 programmes

Anthony_1984 posted:
noggin posted:
Multicamera film was never really used in the UK (it's very expensive) - though it was trialled in the 60s as a way of shooting in an internationally compatible way (as 50Hz region 25fps film can be run at 24fps film in 60Hz regions without standards conversion)


I think they shot the first two series of Chef! on multi-camera film, didn't they? Albeit probably 16 mm rather than 35 mm. That's the only UK sitcom example I can think of.


Yes - it may have been - it's never really been a thing here though.