BBC Arabic

I really hope the Arabic music is kept, I love it. Especially the headline bed. I wonder if Dave Hewson would ever update his website with a few tracks?

Changing to the BBC News branding, especially for BBC Arabic, is ridiculous. The current look is far superior to that of BBC News, especially the graphics.

I wonder how the Arabic channel is doing in terms of ratings? On YouTube I was looking at some AJE clips, and wondered amongst some AlJazeera Arabic clips which showed their newsroom (I hadn't seen it before, it's quite nice, and very spacious) and I was surprised to see BBC World News on one of their plasma's, along with AJE. However, BBC Arabic wasn't on the plasma's. You would have thought it would have been.

Probably because it's been stuck on the same channels for the last two years and nobody has been particularly interested in changing them.

It'd be pretty difficult to measure ratings for an international news channel, maybe using surveys in some markets, but in places like Australia and the US where it isn't carried on most major pay TV networks I can't imagine their reach would be too extensive, especially compared to BBC World and CNNi.

They presumably just haven't got a spare plasma to put it on! Either that or there is one and it's not in shot.

It'll almost certainly be available on their TV sets, Newsrooms (and TV stations in general) have a wide selection of channels on their TVs

We have a digital RF ringmain here at Bush with a couple of hundred channels on it at least. It's based on the same DTT technology that freeview is - but transmitted down the internal RF network at Bush. Although since Pace stopped making the DTVA we have been having difficulty getting set top boxes that tune down low enough to use the system, as our first mux is at about 250Mhz IIRC.

Maybe you should be having a trip to Europe (or Aus) - where DVB-T is used on VHF as well as UHF? Germany runs VHF DTT I believe (in the same way that they use PAL B for analogue VHF OTA)

The maintenance team get enough foreign travel as it is Actually Band III is used for DAB on our ringmain as it should be, the DTT muxes have been slotted in between the top of Band III and the start of band IV and V for the analogue channels - so they are in a very non-standard position.

The tuning isn't so much of an issue, it's the automatic set up from the NIT. If you tell a DTVA to manual tune to 250Mhz it will read the NIT and fully populate the channel list across all 15 or so MUXs in one go, and will automatically retune if the NIT changes. Other boxes which are not quite so standards compliant don't, so you end up having to do 15 manual tunes to set the box up - or try and get it to auto scan at 10Mhz intervals from 250Mhz. Few will scan at anything other than 7 or 8Mhz intervals though, or outside the usual bands. We do still use 8Mhz wide channels, just 10Mhz apart. I've no idea why, in case you are wondering.

I think they have settled on Dreambox STBs for new installs now. But the future is multicasting the Transport Streams over Reith and providing Humax IPTV boxes instead, as they have done at Egton with Arabic (to bring this thread back on track).

Yep - the IP Ring Main has been rolled out in some W12 buildings - using Netgem hardware boxes (I guess now replaced by Humax?) or VLC running on Desktop PCs.

I know I'm late in this but just been having a wonder around You Tube and seen BBC Arabic videos and wow

What a fantastic set of graphics and studio, all together an excellent package!

How can they come up with this for one channel and then churn out the crap for our news channel.

Is the background to the presenters real or a fake backdrop? They should film that background for a bit and chuck it behind the presenters on News 24!

Love the large desk with the video screen on the front

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF27-MzknKs

Its because BBC Arabic got BBC News to make it, while BBC News themselves went to Laimbie Nairn, I still can't believe the mainstream BBC News looks so so poor to BBC Arabic which when you watch it almost hard to believe its a BBC channel, its so good, even the trailers are pretty good.

Yea and I think many are getting tired of reading the same old people complain!!

Saw a different countdown sequence, with a slight modification to the ending BBC logo, they've added a dark black stroke around the BBC logo, it looks even better now.

the director controlling BBC Arabic is doing a very good job today, he is letting the complete music end before going to the presenters shot, its all very good and sleek with BBC Arabic!

I think they should broadcast here as well.