On 23/10/2007, Brian Butterworth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Let's just get this 100% clear: Sky DO NOT OWN THE ASTRA SATELLITES. >
I wasn't suggesting that Sky own the Astra fleet at all, I am quite aware of this. > Surely as the platform provider Sky have a responsibility to > monitor all the content broadcast through their systems (even > if they don't own the satellites and just lease bandwidth)? > It would've seemed a bit pointless to not have the facilities > to monitor all the channels being broadcast. Andrew's got in before me and is right, no Sky arent responsible directly for every channel (although its still the biggest MCR I've been in to date so they are monitoring more than they playout). I suppose the responsibility is between the channel playout center and whoever is uplinking will also have monitoring of various sorts although it won't always be people looking at monitors, most of the time its automatic video and freeze frame detection kit. As Chris mentioned, its a value added sort of thing, its not a direct money maker but might encourage people to subscribe to channels they don't have. I do however take Andrews point that it is a lot of 'pages'. Which equals a lot of expensive equipment to make it happen for every channel. Even if you had 8 channels on each 'page', which is about as many as I reckon you'd get away with thats still quite a large number of pages. Added to that the complexities of bringing the channels together to make the mosaics, for instance we have BBC1, BBC 2, ITV1, C4, Five at the start of the EPG. Sky don't have access directly to ITV for one, as it doesnt go through them, it goes from ITV to Arqiva London->Winchester->Morn Hill so they'd have to bring the video feed in to make their mosaic for this first page either off air or via an expensive video circuit. And if you do that for every channel thats uplinked by someone else thats going to get expensive unless you reorganise the EPG to fit around the content provider. Sorry if that last bit doesnt entirely make sense to some, I've got an image of the diagrams for a lot of these services in my head but its difficult to translate onto paper. It would be a nice idea tho! - 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/
