BBC One HD still can't broadcast regional news in England.

Transmitting London on BBC 1 England HD would solve the problem at a stroke for 25% of the 'England' audience. Can anything clever be done, just inserting an MPEG domain generated caption into the PSB 3 feeds
to all but London ? (Seeing as the Beeb are so worried about inflicting London news on the rest of the country) ?

You could do something clever with statmuxing - the regional services could go blank when there's no regional content, thus giving more space to the core service.

(Sky aren't still doing the Anytime service where Sky+ boxes recorded a non EPG channel to make on demand content available to non-network-connected boxes, are they? I'm trying to think of things which could be done with the leftover bandwidth during downtime...)

Yeah, fair point. (I mean surely, they should be able to split it into 'London', 'North West' and 'South West'.

I thought we were talking about doing stream switching as a temporary solution, until such as time as there are all the regions on D-Sat in HD, though it's incredibly inefficient, but I recall all this being said 15 years ago, about having all 15 regions and nations on SD in satellite, but it still happened !

You're back to extra codecs, and front/backhaul extending beyond London, so significant cost again. In any case the first priority is to get all the non HD regions in upscaled form on BBC 1 HD (as well as the three HD regions)

SVT do this in Sweden on satellite - they have PID switching opts as follows :

1. There are two core feeds of SVT1 Stockholm (I think) and SVT 2 Stockholm - which are the sustaining services.
2. There are Services for SVT1 and SVT2 for lots of regions. When there is only network content, these map to the Stockholm streams.
3. There are PIDs for a single regional audio and video service for each region. When SVT1 OR SVT2 opt-out, the reigonal versions of SVT1 OR SVT2 switch to their regional audio and video streams.

This allows opt-outs on both channels (but not at the same time) - and this is I believe the reason behind the PID switching (as it avoids simulcasting two regional services).

However there is a flash and a bang on the opt-out and opt-back - it would be impossible to cleanly do the regional idents and opt-out headlines/comings up this way, unless you soft-opted the whole junction and news bulletin (which would be feasible)

AIUI this is only used for SD regional opts - as all the streams need to be on the same transponder (re-tuning for an opt-out would take a LONG time)

So this isn't an immediate solution for HD...


I think they are - for people who don't have broadband connections. Not sure it helps much though.

Yes - and until the roadmap for HD upgrades is agreed the approach taken to HD opt-outs probably can't be decided. Can you imagine if the BBC engineered a full BBC One HD opt-chain for every English region, based on upscaling the current services, then decided to move to an IP-production model for HD, which required a totally different opt-chain config and set-up?

Anybody got a recording of the SVT opts anywhere? Would love to see the snap, crackle and pop on that switch.

No snap, crackle or pop. Just a drop to grey and silence (though that may be receiver specific) for a short period on the opts I've seen. They are switching PIDs, not splicing MPEG streams.

I was thinking of potential users for the regional space when it's not being used for the regions. Occasional use for SNG was another, except for the fact that the BBC use the most satellite space when the regional news is on
(also, I'd imagine Astra aren't keen on occasional use and fixed services sharing the same transponder, because of the risk of dual illumination)

BBC One HD has gone back to that awful slide.