Sky / Discovery Dispute

So if Sky pull it off the air, will virgin and others have to pull in the European feeds instead?

I'd hope it's a line feed from playout these days. Think this is Virgin's preferred route for obvious reasons (re-encoding a low bitrate Sky off-air would not be a great idea...)


No - the European feeds won't neccessarily be OK in editorial and rights terms for the UK.

I would imagine that adding a ticker downstream and recording cable and DSat variants separately for Ofcom purposes would be relatively straightforward. It may even be done already.

Ticker over the Australian Open men's final (this was over a replay at the return from a break)



The ticker is the same format as the one they use to inform viewers of over-running events, delays, what's on the other channel etc so presumably being put in at presentation.

Yes, if Virgin takes a re-broadcast of the Sky OTA feed, where would that leave the British Eurosport variant? It would leave them no choice other than to take the pan-European version.

I'd be really surprised if Discovery cared so little about their picture quality that their main feed to Virgin was a Sky off-air. Virgin wouldn't be too happy either.

Sky's off-air is low bitrate 4:2:0 H264 at <15Mbs. You REALLY don't want to re-encode that to MPEG2 or H264 again at those kind of bitrates on demanding content like sport... (And historically Virgin had to run all their HD channels MPEG2 - so couldn't just pass through the stream without transcoding to MPEG2)

For info - the general rule of thumb when concatenating encoding processes is - everything else being equal (and it isn't always) - you need twice the upstream bitrate to your downstream bitrate to transcode with the SAME codec and avoid too many picture quality issues. This doesn't scale (you get diminishing returns at high bitrates) - but it is why broadcast uplinks from OBs are so much higher bitrate than what we receive at home. (38Mbs H264 isn't uncommon)

Eurosport slightly ruining the Australian Open win there by talking about this dispute over scenes of Federer celebrating. Could have waited a few minutes lads.

Even if they did take the channels off-air from satellite, it's just leaving the Sky platform, there's no reason why they can't stay on Astra... though they'd need presumably need some sort of encryption that only Virgin, BT etc can access.


In fact if they do leave Sky on Wednesday I doubt they'd surrender their satellite capacity or even carry on just with no one watching. That way when they do sort out their dispute it's just a case of just adding them back to the platform. Chances are their uplink contract and arrangements don't expire the same time as the Sky carriage

Hmm, perhaps- but it might give them the illusion that they 'love discovery too!!!!!'

Regrettably mass market satellite receivers with CAMs simply don't exist in the UK, thanks to Sky's success
at making their VideoGuard encrypted (and crippled to) receivers de-facto, otherwise there'd be some mileage
in going DTH on their own encrypted platform.

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No - exactly the right time to do it. I'm surprised they didn't run the ticker over match point.

One thing - why direct everyone to moan to @skyhelpteam? That's the technical supports twitter address - better would be to tweet the corporate one - much further up the boardroom chain.

Pissing me off seeing Discovery whining about being kicked off Sky when they still haven't fixed their own Eurosport Player which has been broken on Samsung TVs since before the US Open.

Did you tweet? Or let Eurosport know?