BBC Olympics 2012 Coverage

Yes, as that blog says the BBC Trust have agreed more online video streams. They are going to cover every event, I'm not sure what the maximum number of simultaneous events will be but they will have to use the website for some of them

.... and the online feeds will almost certainly be in 720p HD too, the recent tests give every impression that that's what they're leading uo to.

So that'll just do nothing after 7pm? I doubt it.

There were 40 feeds in Athens given to the rights holders, albeight 6 were beauty shots and not all feeds were in use at all times (but they were every day).

I'd say they almost certainly won't be- at least not all of them- that would put far too much strain on the servers. I'd suspect one or two would be available at 720p but not all of them.

Depends on where the streams are encoded but the extra streams may not even leave the IBC in HD. I don't believe they did in Beijing.

Hm. If BBC One's going all-out on the Olympics, I wonder what they'll do with the news? Shorter bulletins? Ditching it to BBC Two?

(Aside from the horrible complexity of it - it would probably require a few hours off air overnight to reconfigure things - they could essentially swap over the BBC One and BBC Two chains in England - ie rename the SIDs, change the regionalisation onto BBC Two, etc - and then move the regional news over there for the fortnight. It would cause some problems for analogue, but will there be any analogue left by then?)

The last analogue will be in the South East, no specific dates for all of them transferring yet. Just says 2012.

All of Meridian and London's dates have been confirmed (London in April, Meridian over by the time of the Olympics beginning). That still leaves Tyne Tees and UTV to have dates confirmed which implies they'll be later in 2012, I guess they'll be the last then? I had assumed it'd be Crystal Palace last but apparently not.

There was talk about whether to delay London's switch-over until after the Olympics but as you say Crystal Palace is going over in April.

The North East and Northern Ireland was always going to be last for some reason, despite them working so far broadly from west to east across the country. There's no reason why it should be London, although because of the number of people in the region it was never going to be an early one.

Northern Ireland's DSO is to an extent driven by the Republic's DSO, and there were planning permission delays at Divis for the new mast that is required there. I think that's why it's so late in 2012.
Tyne Tees region is a mystery though, after the Yorkshire DSO, due for completion on Sept 21st this year, it's a total analogue island, so no reason (from a freq planning perspective) why it can't switch.

Digital UK announce the switchover dates for a particular region about 12 months prior to the actual event, so by defination both Ulster and Tyne Tees now almost certainly won't be any earlier than mid Aug 2012 (after the games).

They've said BBC1 will pretty much be "news and Olympics" and the main evening events pretty much fit in the 7-10pm window, so although I suspect they'll be some occassions where the news is shortened or moved, on the whole I think they'll manage to keep the bulletins as they are.

EDIT: Just checked his blog and he's confirmed news will be on BBC1 with coverage only really on BBC2 when the news is on BBC1.

And not sure how much credibility I'd give this but The Mirror claiming that the BBC is looking to share the rights with either ITV or C4 for 2016.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/celebs/tv/2011/08/16/bbc-set-to-share-olympic-games-tv-coverage-115875-23347574/

It sounds plausible, IIRC the EBU won't be block buying the Olympic rights after 2012 and they'll be sold on a country to country basis. As the article says, the Olympics used to be shared so it wouldn't be a bad thing to do it again