On 10/23/07, Andrew Bowden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Some broadcasters pay Sky to playout their channels and they'll monitor > those I'm sure. Many broadcasters go through 3rd parties or do it > themselves. Who knows what the exact proportions are, but given how > many channels there are, there's a lot of channels to monitor and Sky > won't want to be doing regular monitoring of most of the channels, I'm > sure. > > Ultimately playout monitoring has to be the resposibility of the > broadcaster in question - which is why four floors below my desk, > there's a batch of people working for Red Bee Media whose job it is to > check what they pump out (which includes BBC, BBC Worldwide, UKTV and > Virgin Media Television)
Likewise, the organisations who deal with the coding and multiplexing of those channels (not always the same people as playout) will be monitoring the streams they're sending up to the satellites and other distribution platforms to make sure all that's happening OK. And they'll have lots of mosaics in front of them too.[1] Technically what's being suggested here is easy - and there are bits of kit which will do it without a sweat[2]. Likewise, the interactive part of the channel picking isn't hard - see the BBC News multiscreen for a simple example, and you could associate plenty more audio streams with a service. I think what we've probably established so far is that the politics of getting such a service up and running are what might prevent getting it off the ground. But surely that's not insurmountable, and if someone like Sky wanted to offer it as 'added value' for their subscribers, then they could buy some mosaics, some off-air recievers, lease some more bandwidth, and do it. (It needn't even neccesarily take up a precious Sky EPG number, by making it accessable from an option on the Sky guide) - martin [1] I'm not sure why I'm talking in hypotheticals here - I sit in front of such monitoring walls at work... [2] http://www.zandar.com/products/dx.htm for example
