Hi Brian,
A part of what you say shows exactly why a new "global" standard
needs to be designed to catalogue digital data. The time has come,
for copyright reasons as well as real control factors, to identify
every single piece of digital data that is produced at source. From
the output of a camera or a live microphone, all the way through to
TV/Radio/Net.... all of it is now digitised at some point.
Surely at the point of encoding it will make the connections you
speak of so much easier to control. Just select from a database in
any control room.
As in CD's, it needs date of production,owner,country and maybe a
specific numerical tag to ID the exact content.
A url is simply not enough, or too complicated, to allow the
convergence that we are now seeing. With this, all bit-stream
readers, from computers onwards, could read that code. I know it is a
"big" issue, and perhaps not for Backstage, but the effect would be
tremendous.... we could all then produce, connect, choose or even
pay, with that same tiny professional code.
On a lighter note, isn't it funny that there is always someone
available on commercial shows to add, "phone lines now closed" on a
repeat. :-) I have seen it a lot, and find it very amusing.
RichE
On 12 Jan 2007, at 19:59, George Wright wrote:
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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