Brian Butterworth wrote:
> Nice idea for a side-by-side information system for Five Live. I've
> said before that it would be great for the BBC's live news services
> (so, Radio 4, Five Live, News24 and BBC World) to constantly broadcast
> a live news.bbc.co.uk unique identifier alongside each story.
>
.<snip>
> On digital TV it would be very handy for the current story to made
> available IN FULL as part of the OpenTV (satellite) or MHEG5
> (Freeview) service. These "red button" services have very, very cut
> down versions of the stories on their services (to save bandwidth and
> increase response times), but it wouldn't break the bitstream bank for
> the full text of one story to be accessible in full by pressing the
> red button.
Hi there. I work in Interactive TV development at the BBC. This is an
interesting idea. A few things about it immediately spring to mind:
* We don't always have associated (on iTV) stories for each bulletin
that News produces (there are a lot of bulletins, and a lot of channels,
and limited space for text content, as you've noticed) - so what do we
do when there's no iTV content around a specific story within a bulletin?
* We're seeing increasing use of time shifted viewing - (Vod, PVRs, the
catchup TV stuff we're doing, home brew Myth/ whatever boxes) - and
unless these save the MHEG/ data stream (unlikely for most of them)
anyone viewing after the event will, at best, be taken to a completely
unrelated story. Not a deal-breaker, but still a bit annoying
* If the story *does* exist, how do we identify it? Some stuff's
easy(ish) - ('new Bush announcement', 'UK Minister resigns', etc) -
but a lot of more complex stories might have a number of different
options. This will involve human intervention or some clever munging to
match up - which could go wrong.
* If we have identified the story correctly, mapping it precisely to the
time of the slot within the bulletin will be hard (bulletins go out live
and don't always stick to the running order). It'd probably involve some
one pushing buttons in the playout area iun real time to sync it to the
broadcast- and to do that for all our bulletins is a lot of people doing
a lot of button pushing :(
* There's an unpredictable latency between stuff being TXed and being
displayed by the receiver/ STB (depending on platform, satellite, etc
etc) . This could mean we have 'stale', 'unrelated' content around the
story.
* Ugh, regional variation (of linear news bulletins compared to our
relatively un-regionalised iTV content)
* Assuming all the above are solved (gets out magic wand), we still have
to get the viewer to the content. The 'bridge' (right hand side bar you
get when you press red) has space for specific content slots, and main
headlines, etc - but tbh whatever's on BBC News at 1822 on a slow news
day might not make the cut - and if we can't get the viewer to the
content, all the above is lost. It wouldn't be an option to take people
straight to the news story in question simply by them pressing the red
button - not everyone's pressing red to find out more information on
said news story
All that said, it is something to think about. Interested in people's
thoughts.
> Also, for PC reception of Freeview or DSat, a current-story-identifier
> would - software permitting -allow XP Media Center, Vista Ultimate etc
> to link to a relevant web page.
Where would we put this data track? And how would the software at the
other end decode it? There's limited support for MHEG decoding/ browsing
on consumer DVB-T PC cards, and I don't know that we'd be embedding urls
in TV based content. I'm also unsure of any consumer Open TV based
decoder for PCs, which would rule out people moving to content from a
DSAT stream.
Regards and thanks for the thought-provoking idea
George
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