Presidential Inauguration Coverage.

ST

stuartfanning 21 January 2009 10:40am

Here's how US Cable system Comcast dealt with Obama's Inaugural speech.. Incredible!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxVUYrZKi-g

BR

Brekkie 21 January 2009 11:48am

7m watched the speech live on BBC1, with 6.5m staying tuned for the 6pm news.

However, later in the evening news bulletins didn't get an Obama bounce, with both the 10pm bulletins down on last Tuesday (4.7m/1.9m), and the excellent C4 News only managed 772,000, with 265,000 watching Five at 7pm.

KB

Kent Brockman 21 January 2009 12:12pm

Ant posted:

Inspector Sands posted:

Brekkie posted:

I got fed up of waiting for the parade, but agree with the majority here that Sky seem to have a much better operation - it just looks alot better and slicker.

They did spoil it somewhat by cluttering their screen during the actual ceremony. CNN just had a 'CNN Live' in the bottom right and BBC1 just had 'Live Washington' in the top left, nice and minimalist. Sky had things in 3 corners and a pointless distracting bright yellow ticker advertising their HD service.

It was terrible the amount of graphics Sky News SD had. I watched them up until Biden was sworn in and had to change to BBC One minutes later.

Agreed on this.

Flicked between BBC and Sky, Sky had far superior picture quality, and less chatter during the ceremony itself. But I could only put up with the ticker relentlessly repeating the same line about HD coverage for so long, so I ended up sticking with the 'cleaner' BBC coverage.

PE

Pete Founding member 21 January 2009 1:00pm

noggin posted:

The BBC HD coverage looked great (the US multilateral pool was HD, the BBC unilaterals were SD upconverts) - I'm sure it was better than the Sky HD internet stream.

you wouldn't think it given the moans of those on the BBC Internet Blog

NG

noggin Founding member 21 January 2009 3:32pm

Hymagumba posted:

noggin posted:

The BBC HD coverage looked great (the US multilateral pool was HD, the BBC unilaterals were SD upconverts) - I'm sure it was better than the Sky HD internet stream.

you wouldn't think it given the moans of those on the BBC Internet Blog

Ah - I hadn't realised Sky Artsworld HD was also showing it in HD... No doubt it looked better than BBC HD as people on the blog have commented - just as the Eurosport HD Olympics stuff looked better than the same stuff on BBC HD (though the BBC sounded better - Eurosport's commentary quality was AWFUL)

The Beeb seem to still be running very early H264 encoders - whereas Sky replaced theirs a while back. However I suspect there is a LOT more politics involved at the Beeb than at Sky when it comes to dealing with their outsourced partners AND also issues of spectrum use to be dealt with - which Sky simply don't have to worry about.

I didn't see the Sky HD Internet stream - what format, resolution and bitrate was it at? I had assumed it was a <8Mbs kind of thing... Was it >12Mbs 1920x1080/50i H264 or better?

RO

roo 21 January 2009 5:08pm

noggin posted:

I didn't see the Sky HD Internet stream - what format, resolution and bitrate was it at? I had assumed it was a <8Mbs kind of thing... Was it >12Mbs 1920x1080/50i H264 or better?

Oh, the internet stream wasn't close to 'broadcast HD' by any stretch - thinking closer to 'YouTube HD', while still obviously much better than one has come to expect from online streaming fare.
I'm on a 10Mbps connection and was generally getting it at ~2.3Mbps at what I believed to be 1280x720 (but I could be deeply wrong about that). I'm also not sure if the bitrate was able to scale up any more from there - it might've just been very prudent about how much of one's capacity it tried to use.

(January 2009)