A couple of subtitles questions

I suppose so, but then I think it's more to do with the BBC setting up it's own playout department and then pitching for work.

I believe there were plans to let Red Bee take over the nations at one point

wasn't that the one where it mentioned how a woman in scotland was subtitling the breakfast midlands today bulletins?

Does anyone know whether there are any plans to move subtitling over to an automated system? Voice recognition has come along way from the inaccurate gimick it was in the late 90's and is starting to mature now - there are some very good and accurate systems in use (like one that Barclays PDQ use for telephone referalls) so to me it doesn't seem like too much of a pipe dream to actually have an automated system 'listening' to the programme as broadcast and generating the subtitles rather than having a physical person listening to and manually entering them.

Although the technology obviously isn't yet ready to be let loose on an episode of Coronation Street, I can see it going that way, so find it surprising that there isn't more research and trials being done in this area.

I would have thought Coronation Street was the perfect show to test this kind of technology on. As its not live, so any mistakes can be corrected before broadcast. Soaps probably have the widest varity of acents and plenty of background noise too so it would really test the technology.

I believe some live subtitles are done with voice reconition already anyway. The subtitler respeaks whatever is being said on screen.

That would be a disaster, not just for viewers in those nations (who would doubtless lose the live continuity they currently enjoy) but would also be the nail in the coffin for TV playout taking place outside the capital.

2 assumptions by you there - why would they get rid of 'live continuity'? They will do what the BBC asks and pays for. Secondly it wouldn't have meant moving anything, just the departments and staff in the nations transferring

They are using voice recognition, but with a 'respeaker' who repeats what's been said on screen.

Doing it totally as voice recognition is very difficult, and much more so than an automated phone system. A phone system only needs to recognise a certain number of words in a controlled environment of a phone line, a subtitling system has to know thousands of words in a range of diffrent voices, sometimes with music, sometimes with voices talking over each other etc.

Coronation Street isn't a good example to use for voice recognition as it's scripted. Why re-do all the subtitles when they can just cut and paste the script into the subtitle computer? If they (and they might be) were developing a voice recognition subtitling system they'd be better off trying it on the types of programme on which it would actually be used

Red Bee is already ditching as much live continuity as it can get away with on BBC1 and BBC2 - even morning Schools on BBC2 isn't safe and (by the sounds of it) the 3:20pm news on BBC1. The amount of times the word "cost effective" appears on Red Bee's website in relation to their playout of BBC channels is alarming.

And with this in mind, why would Red Bee continue to employ people to work in continuity suites in Belfast, Glasgow and Cardiff when they could all do it under one roof at the Broadcast Centre? Rumour has it the brand spanking new transmission suites are Pacific Quay are NOT HD equipped...

They'll do what the BBC ask them to do, the BBC are their customers. If the BBC dont' want live announcers at a certain time then they won't provide them. What's teh big deal about live announcing anyway, especially during the non-exsistant schools programmes?

As for being 'cost effective'..... what do you want exactly, for them to waste money?




Understandable, why build a HD suite when there are no plans for 'BBC Scotland HD' and by the time it ever does launch (if it does).... the equipment will be outdated?

I'm sure the suites were built with the future in mind, it would certainly be easier to upgrade the new ones to HD if necessary then the ones in the old building

A very big deal as things can go wrong at any time of day, and it's perfectly reasonable for someone to be there to keep viewers informed when things do go wrong. As the past has proven, the Learning Zone is particularly vulnerable.


But we seem to have the opposite problem ATM; trying to spend as little money on the continuity operation as possible (and now CAs moving to 12-hour shifts. Hard on the workers - easy on the accountants).

Admittedly though, some of the budget is being misappropriated on unpopular elements such as ECPs and generic credit squeezing...


It could also be interpreted that HD suites were not installed because by the time they were required, Red Bee or someone else will have taken over playout...

But that isn't a Red Be thing.

The BBC are customers of Red Bee. If they ask for a graphic to be played out at the end of a programme, Red Bee will find a way to do it





Who knows what's going to happen in the future. But one thing TV companies don't do is build expensive facilities for new services that might or might not happen sometime in the future!

If there were plans to move playout from Glasgow they'd have done it when BBC Scotland moved