BBC 2012 - The Olympic Broadcaster

Two observations after watching the USA-France highlights:

1) The USA flag is hideously badly realised on the BBC gfx - it looks like it only has 4 stars

2) A very clunky final score graphic with USA V FRANCE in big type and underneath it 4-2 in much smaller, subtitle type.

Hey, that reminds me of Thames TV.

Found this by chance but it appears that Sue Barker carried the Olympic Torch through Mitcham, London yesterday.

That's a nice video. I'm glad Sue has got a decent role at these games, it did seem like she was being sidelined last winter games, I imagine she will be scaling back after the games though.

Big DOG, little DOG...

Has there been any more information on the 3D highlights show that BBC HD will be showing each night? Presumably it will be independent of BBC1's highlights as the 3D will be an hour whereas BBC1's is longer. And presumably the content will have to be different anyway as I'm assuming they'll be using different footage?

Given how few people will be watching it I wonder if they'll bother with a presenter or voice-over and just show one hour of sports footage without any links?

It'll be an OBS-produced programme, with an intro by a BBC presenter.

Oh I see. I wonder how many countries will be taking this. I know Nine in Australia have launched a 3D channel for the Olympics.

This may have been mentioned but if you watch the football on Olympic 3 right now, press red and select the game through there it automatically takes you to the HD channel rather than back to the SD one. I wonder if this is restricted to HD boxes? If so I didn't realise you could restrict interactive content in that way between SD and HD boxes.

Also (another annoying question), has the HD channel swap on Sky+HD been put in place for these channels? The Radio Times only lists the SD channel numbers for Sky whereas they include the HD channel numbers for Virgin.

Harry Gration and Celina Hinchcliffe present it.

I was on the understanding that the HD swap is in use. Also I wonder if anyone here with a Sky SD box can get the interactive application, as given that it is in HD it looks like the application has been built on the new Linux platform rather than the old OpenTV platform as used for all the other interactive services.

On my HD Freesat box, only the HD versions of the channels are available (Ch150 to 174)

I suspect an SD Freesat box will have the SD versions on those same positions.

So Sky will be using the same idea. Why would anyone with an HD box want to see/record the SD versions ? (other than saving HDD space on a PVR perhaps !)

Not quite - Sky use SD/HD swapping for some channels - but both versions stay in the EPG.

On my Sky HD box BBC Olympics 1-24 HD are 450-473, BBC Olympics 1-24 SD are 474-497. On an SD box I suspect that the SD versions are on 450-473 if HD swap is being used?

Sky don't do an either/or with the SD/HD variants - presumably because some people might, as you suggest, want more recording time on their PVRs by recording SD channels even if there are HD variants. (Though even SD shows look better unconverted on the HD channels than on the native SD broadcasts usually)