It seems that East Midlands and North East and Cumbria have been given the wrong label. The two letters after the channel name indicate the city where the regional centre is. NC should be Newcastle/North East and Cumbria, and NT should be Nottingham/East Midlands, but they are the other way around.
Hehe, it seems i've mis-interpreted the city codes, all the ones beginning with N are different.
Will each of these channels broadcast BBC One all the time, with the correct regional news and promos for each region on 101? If so, whats the bandwidth and picture quality like. Better or worse than the London version of BBC One on DSat at the minute? Seems like a lot of hassle, and must be expensive.
Will each of these channels broadcast BBC One all the time, with the correct regional news and promos for each region on 101? If so, whats the bandwidth and picture quality like. Better or worse than the London version of BBC One on DSat at the minute? Seems like a lot of hassle, and must be expensive.
They will all broadcast the 'national' BBC One when not showing regional items. The quality so far looks pretty sharp to me. We'll have to wait till they show some football before we can really tell.
Time for some reviews from Forumers who wouldn't normally see regions such as the south west?
Yeah it was nice actually, very friendly, but I couldn't help but feel sad remembering how it used to be until 2000 -- it was lovely back then. Boo, no lighthouse. They should let BBC South West keep that as their symbol, like they kept the dragon on for WT during the corporate revamp -- both motifs are the same age. And that's where David Braine has gone..
SE Today was the other one I had a look at, and it wasn't really that bad, they seemed to move over to the newsroom area after a while. I would post caps of the two but I don't have time. Maybe later.
The English programmes are just so short though -- they'd finished, had a local Inside Out trail, national weather forecast, and Wales Today was still going! Tut, lightweights..
Ugh, Network continuity now.. run away!
I might check back at Breakfast time though, just in case -- there are some people I simply *have* to see..
But I fear Friday isn't a Tina Bangs day either
This is way earlier than I'd expected it to be ready - given the BBC have been cautiously saying August/Autumn since the deal was done at the weekend - though obviously all the regional access stuff still has to be setup to ensure everyone gets the right region.
Means I can finally pack away my indoor aerial and watch South East Today in the quality it is supposed to be viewed at.
It'll be interesting to see if they can setup BBCi in such a way that it can default to your local regional news automatically when you go into the service, or regional sport/travel/weather etc.
No - all BBC channels are FTA now (as opposed to FTV - requiring a card - as they were before). And you will be able to get all the regions "somewhere" in the EPG (probably 900s) when the full service is launched.
I've got them all in now. And it's interesting to note that with the commencements of these tests, the BBC now has more regions on Dsat than ITV does. And the remaining (I think it's only sub-opts isn't it?) BBC regions will be added, whilst ITV have no firm plans to extend their Dsat regional service further.
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Yeah it was nice actually, very friendly, but I couldn't help but feel sad remembering how it used to be until 2000 -- it was lovely back then. Boo, no lighthouse. They should let BBC South West keep that as their symbol, like they kept the dragon on for WT during the corporate revamp -- both motifs are the same age. And that's where David Braine has gone..
Yep, see why I prattle on so much about how Spotlight was stronger without the corporate news look applied to it? It's just not the same is it?
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Will each of these channels broadcast BBC One all the time, with the correct regional news and promos for each region on 101? If so, whats the bandwidth and picture quality like. Better or worse than the London version of BBC One on DSat at the minute? Seems like a lot of hassle, and must be expensive.
Yes these channels will broadcast all the time - that's the reason behind all the changes to FTA. It is of course not cheap, but they had to do something. And apparantly permanently broadcasting all the regions FTA is cheaper than keeping the conditional access system they had which only provided 4 national regions - showing how overpriced Sky's access rates are.
The picture quality isn't too bad at all (although the FEC is higher at 5/6 instead of 3/4). It does seem to vary slightly between regions however. I watched the link into South East Today and then the 'South East' text on the BBC One ident was nice and sharp. But after Spotlight the BBC One box on the regional trailer had 'South West' text had some compression artifacts in it. But in any case, picture quality is still much better than it is on the 'press red' regional system (which is still running till the end of this week - if not next week aswell?).
I assume that those English regions will stay there for good now - I can't think of any compelling reason to remove them before they launch.
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Wonder if they are rushing to get it up before Wimbledon starts -- bearing in mind they are stopping the current system then.
Assuming that the tests are permanent, it would be nice if they advertised that they could be added through 'add channels' now. It's awful to think that the full (pretty much, anyway) BBC1 regional service is available now and yet officially they still only have that convoluted 'press red for one of 5 regions' available. I was probably one of less than 10 people who watched Spotlight through Dsat tonight - which is very sad.
