On Tue, 6 Mar 2007 11:08:06 +0000, Andy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: <snip other stuff>
> Now onto George's email. Hiya. And, FYI, I work for the BBC, in the Interactive TV production. I don't work in Web, or streaming, and tbh don't know about BBC policy on those, and am a little wary because there are people who know a lot more about this than I do who work here. So all these are my opinions, not the BBC's. Much of what I wrote about came from either picked up snippets, or my own attempts to get the BBC's stuff working on various of my own computers over the years (on free OSs). > I read the links. I don't understand the point about not having the > resources. Can you tell me how much Johnathon Ross gets payed? And you > are saying you would notice the cost of equipment for Ogg encoding > compared with that? Well, that's not really the way large organisations budget stuff. Less money for 'talent' (radio/ TV presenters) isn't directly available to spend of hardware or people to run streaming/ playout servers. And certainly not when the existing audience is very happy with either Real or Windows. People are *not* requesting (in any sizable amounts) for Free format audio/video streaming. > This is an old PC, it is more than capable of real time ogg encoding, > and its running things like gnome at the same time. We're no just talking about one stream - remember we make 3500 hours of programmes a day, every day. > Maybe you need two in case one fails, but it still won't cost a lot. We'd need a lot more than two. We wouldn't run something in the field without a whole load of failover, etc, and these would need to be decent boxes, with proper racks, etc.. > So we know it's not a cost issue. It's, amongst other things, a cost/benefit issue. > Availability of software, the BBC uses Unix (or a Unix like operating > system) am I correct? Amongst other things, yes. Sol and GNU/Linux. <snip> > So far it looks to me like the BBC is intentionally trying to > influence the software market to the detriment of the public. I hope I > am wrong. You are. > You seem to be much more helpful than the person who told me I should > install ActiveX from microsoft.com on my Linux machine. Well, I don't like it when I'm told that either. I'm trying to find the reasons you're so unhappy with what the BBC does. I've snipped a lot of your questions above - I can't solve them, but I've been trying to understand them. I will *try* to get an official ish answer to your question about Ogg and report back. I can promise you it isn't a conspiracy, and can bet that the BBC would rather not pay for streaming server licences, and would love to have free formats only - but this is the real world, and decisions are based on a number of factors, including benefit to the licence fee payer, quality of service, and many other things which may not seem apparent on first look. Regards George PS this is now in my sig when posting here. -- You seem nicer than I imagined for a BBC employee. (disclaimer, I work for the BBC) - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
