Interesting question, and one that might be someone clarrified by an indepth review of the complete broadcast chain and metadata managment chain involved in taking material from the original source carrier (file or tape or live feed) into the multiple iPlayer assets that each programme produces.
Sadly I haven't the time, put it's potentially a suggestion to put to the BBC Internet Blog team, and they might be able to oblige. Do bear in mind though, that to an extent ingesting once for broadcast and iplayer distribution does represent a certain level of eficiently- if we did them seperately I'm sure someone would suggest we ought to use a single ingest process to save duplicating work (and they'd have a point!). Also, and I've only thought of this just now- if the b'cast playout has errors occasionally (and I'll admit it does from time to time) bear in mind that this is inspite of one f the very best and biggest technical broadcast output support oganisations in the world giving it their all to 'keep the needles wagging'. Doing that all over again is a second point of potential error- we are better off doing it once and doing our best to get that right, rather than trying less hard twice I would think. There will be other reasons too, hopefully this will spark an illuminating discussion, ant On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 1:19 PM, Frankie Roberto <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all, > > Apologies if this has been answered before, but is there any reason why the > BBC iPlayer seems to only encode programmes from the live broadcast stream, > rather than, say, using the actual master tapes/digital files? Sure, it > might be simpler, but long-term it'd be great to use the original source. > > Some reasons for doing so: > > * occasionally the live broadcast has errors (eg loss of signal, or playout > error) > * you could trim the programmes more precisely - no more having to skip the > last few minutes of previous programme > * no more "credit squeezes" and continuity announcements trailing programmes > that you can't actually watch > * you could even produce a slightly different edit of a TV show - for > example, with dramas like Doctor Who you wouldn't have text at the end > saying "Next week..." > > Are there any plans for this? Seems like it'd be the obvious next step in > improving the user experience of iPlayer... > > Frankie > > -- > Frankie Roberto > Experience Designer, Rattle > 0114 2706977 > http://www.rattlecentral.com > > -- Ant Miller tel: 07709 265961 email: [email protected] - 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/[email protected]/
