PromoSmart: Personalised trails on live BBC channels

Not really - as it would mean they couldn't be statmuxed.

It stops you being able to statmux though - so it's not without new limitations. UK DVB-T and T2 stuff (apart possibly from local TV) is statmuxed to maximise encoding efficiency. If you need to replace content at the DVB level, you can't statmux, so you are then either dropping quality or increasing bitrate of your CBR system to mitigate.

Remember this is how BBC One English regional news effectively worked on DVB-T in the early days of regional opting on DVB-T (without the automatic signalling) - and this meant BBC One was CBR at around 5.8Mbs with BBC Two, Three/CBBC, News 24 statmuxed with each other (but not with BBC One). (Think Parliament and possibly BBC Four/CBeebies were still on a different mux at this point?)

The limitations of having to run CBR for channels that use 'local replacement' mean that it's not really a go-er here for DVB-T/DVB-T2 'drop ins' here.

You can still stat mux as there are very expensive engines which can remux into the available space .... I demoed this to the BBC - at Romsey on 6/7/2005 ...
the day London won the Olympics .
the situation I was illustrating was the north Devon coast where you could feed DTT relay with a DTT wenvoe ( Wales) and a DSAT BBC west region.....
both being stat muxed
so we did both that all be it using a off air DTT from rowridge and DSAT
another region or itv, ch 4 CBeebies or whatever !!!
and also replacement with a CBR TS from a server.
You might just be able to see the difference ...
it was all done in very clever mathematics ....

But it was not cheap enough for widespread use.

But in the itv case the cost of MAMing remote transmitted based servers and MPEG splicing I would have though would out way the cost if the 100Mbit/sec connections to the transmitters and the Red Bee etc costs,

I was wondering if, as part of this new technology partnership between the BBC and Sky, they might be working on one of their "creative solutions" to provide regional news on BBC One HD.

It doesn't strike me as a huge leap of technology from being able to insert bespoke trails, to being able to switch to a live IP stream of your specific regional news. I appreciate this wouldn't be as robust as playing out something saved in advance on the hard drive, but if buying new transponder space is too expensive, surely a solution like this must be on the cards.

It’s a lot easier just to stream regions HD ...

To do the switch to ( and from) an IP source seamlessly requires you to have the first I frame of the new source available to switch to ....., and that means some buffering in the TV set...
it also would mean mechanised opting which is not much liked by the regions !

Remember most bbc opts are seamless during programmes so they are totally unscheduled and playout know nothing about them ..... it is only the regional news after the main bulletins ( and inside out) which are scheduled but if course the regions are not controlled by the schedule!


(Alleged ) frame accurate switching was used to substitute a regional symbol blanketing the network symbol for instance into the main news ..it was carried in Insertion test signal ...
but was often not quite as accurate as you would like !