Winter Olympics 2010 - Vancouver - BBC TWO/HD/RB/OL/IP

Yep - I was a student during the 1992 Albertville/Barcelona games - and had hacked a redundant BSB receiver and Squarial to receive the French and German DBS satellites (TDF and TVSat?) and was able to watch the HD coverage (in 16:9 SD via an RGB SCART). The novelty of watching widescreen sport in component quality was quite amazing - even if I did have to modify a TV to get it to letterbox... Being able to chose your commentary language in mono and mix it with stereo effects was quite clever as well (though they had problems making it work ISTR)

Jane Hoffen was a regular News 24 sport presenter from launch and also did some of BBC Choice's early sports shows I think. She married David Robertson (News 24 Breakfast presenter) and they both moved to Scotland when David joined Reporting Scotland, when Breakfast replaced Breakfast News on BBC One and the BBC News 24 Breakfast/Weekend 24 strand ISTR, around 2000ish? (Co-incided with BBC One News going 16:9?)

October 2000, straight after the Olympics. Breakfast News ended on the day of the Opening Ceremony and for the two weeks of the Games, there was a ninety minute simulcast of News 24 on BBC2 from 7-8.30am.

Yes - ISTR that the BBC got quite a lot of comments about how good the News 24 Olympic Breakfast service was that year. Simple straightforward news bulletins done pretty well given the limitations of the channel facilities and time etc.

NRK had a windowless set for Beijing as well so I'd be very surprised if they weren't in Norway.

BBC HD still looks pretty HD to me - as does the HD stuff on C4HD, E4HD and the Sky HD channels. Some of Sky's HD sometimes looks excessively "edgey" - as if they're making it look "super crisp" (actually making it less detailed rather than more) - but I think they know their market...

The BBC have significantly reduced their transmission bitrate for BBC HD (last Summer ISTR) but this is because they've upgraded their ancient H264 encoders (which weren't significantly better than MPEG2 encoders at the same bitrate - and weren't using much more than a toolset similar to MPEG2) to brand new state-of-the-art models which are massively more efficient (and use far more of the AVC toolset - causing MS/ATI some problems with Media Center drivers until recently). The quality hasn't massively dropped with the bitrate reduction, in fact some interlaced native stuff actually looks noticably better.

AIUI some of the stuff in the Winter Olympics programmes may have been downconverted to SD during the route to screen - as the circuits between Vancouver and London aren't all HD, and neither is the VT operation entirely HD. I expect the live stuff will usually be HD - but if it is delayed or pre-recorded then it may not always be HD. Not sure if the studio and location cameras are HD, and whether the unilaterals are HD.

One major issue is that as purchased most HDTV sets absolutely mangle a decent HD picture - in particular the sharpness processing is almost always wound up far higher than needed (we run our Full HD display at 0% sharpness in 1:1 pixel mode) - as sharpness processing will replace real picture detail with fake edges, and makes slightly noisy pictures look horrid.

I've yet to see an HDTV display on show in a shop with a watchable picture, and I bet most people don't go into the menus to optimise things when they get home. (I've switched all the noise reduction off, reduced the backlight level, chucked VIVID in the bin where it belongs, and also switched off all the "enhancements" - some of which make white text on a black background look very badly keyed)

But then so did NBC for some of their shows... (And they were definitely in the IBC at Beijing - they had more than half of it ISTR?)

But NBC's a large broadcaster who easily paid the highest amount for rights out of all the broadcasters in the world (or so I've read) while NRK's a PSB from a relatively small country. I just can't see NRK setting up a special studio on the other side of the world and not having a window when they could do the same back home for far less.

BBC having awful link problems on the Nordic Downhill Combined coverage now, blocking, breaking up, and fault captions abound (FV 301)

Funnily enough I've had to fix this on the sets of at least two family members who have recently got TFTs and have SD sky boxes. Makes a significant difference to the quality and I really don't understand what the manufacturers think the benefit of having this on by default is.

I think part of the problem with HD and perception of the picture quality is that people expect the whole frame to be in pin sharp focus, where often you only want the foreground to be sharp so that the depth of field looks more natural.

This is on 'Press Red' only isn't it? What fault caption do they use? Is there a 'Press Red' fault caption?

Special purpose Olympic Break of Service caption on a Whistler Background. using the generic Olympic Style.

Do the BBC still look after pres for red button or is it RedBee now? AFAIK TC6's old gallery area was converted into a control suite for red button when it was moved downstairs, but I guess that may have become obsolete and the function moved down the road.