All posts by Briantist
Below are all of Briantist's postings, with the most recent are at the bottom of the page.
MikeB: I've expanded on the possiblities for the radio cuts on a follow-up page What is in store for the next round of BBC Radio cuts?
I'm guessing that the BBC is going to get a torrent of abuse from people who really don't like the cuts that are going to come up now, but I suppose people will say "the cuts are pre-agreed. We have to cut the LW transmissions".
Yes, people are going to throw around words like "philistine" whatever happens to Radio 3 (which is very good at what it does, but when it's down to it Classical Music recordings can be bought).
I suspect the DAB tolls are going to at the back of the queue when the torrent of changes. They might be happy if services are merged (combined R3/R4, R4LW bits to 4X, R1 and R1X) as there might be more bits for the resultant services.
CBBC is brilliant, but ... expensive. What do you do when you've got to cut things?
You know I think that Regional News is the product of the BBC mirroring the IBA/ITV network, "regions" make no sense otherwise. I'm guessing that they will be cut back a lot, because it is easy to save the money there. The problem is then having expensive studios set up for 15 minutes a day.
I would close S4C and replace it with subtitles (and/or overdubs) in Welsh for BBC One. Could do the whole year's output for £100k, rather than £100m. Works well in other countries.
I always wonder about people who "depend" on Long wave... no TV, no Licence equals no obligation!
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Paul Ryan: Loft installations are not recommended as the material in the roof and roof area can cause reception problems as well as attenuate the signal.
Often people find they are using a "signal reflection" in the roof which goes away over time as the weather changes.
The best course of action is try it if that is easy to do. However with the com7 being a Single Frequency Network AND -5.9dB weaker, it could be more prone to loft-install problems than normal.
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Bucks Boy: These points do come up.
First it is worth remembering that the role of "Presenter" is just the front-man (or front-woman) for a whole heap of journalists and other specialists. If you look at page 46 of the Anne Bulford report, it shows that around 2% of the BBC workforce is "Presenters", with 31% doing Journalism.
Cutting back presenters won't make much of a saving, and given that talking for half an hour to a live audience is a non-trivial skill, better for the studio to have an extra pair of hands, than have a problem and end up with a blank screen.
Of course for Look East (and some other regions too) the "third" presenter is a COST-SAVING measure. Rather than have two programmes, the to halve of the region share a lot of content, with with some considerable time spent doing either CAMBRIDGE or NORWICH news.
The very fact that you don't notice the joins (watch the two programmes in parallel in iPlayer) does rather show the skill the BBC have in doing this type of split-production.
You need to remember that "a very short less than riveting report" also means turning up and finding out what is going on, writing that into a script and then filming it and editing it into a suitable package. It's non-trivial too.
I've looked more into the regional news issue here - What is in store for the next round of BBC regional TV cuts?
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Chris Guest: simulcasting is a way of saving money.
The suggestion you made would cost the BBC one budget an extra 2.5 hours of extra output a week.
Also... That news show is one of the highest rating TV programmes in the UK.
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Closer: Let's answer that. Firstly, the weather turns up on News channels twice an hour, and there's a good reason for it.
The weather presenters are (at least at the BBC) actual metrologics from "the Met Office". They are able to take the raw output from the computers and convert this into a "story", with accompanying images.
Due to the nature of rolling news, and also the ability of the weather to go from "dull" to "critical", they are past masters at taking a slot that they don't know the length of it and making it look like an efffortless chat.
If the news runs over, it has to be a quick summary, if the newsroom has a a breakdown they often have to cover!
As far as I know the duty weather presenters do all the forecasts (TV, radio and online) centrally, there aren't "teams" in every region. Live weather forecasts on other channels are staggered to allow one person to do them all.
Also, it is worth remembering that many people tune in JUST for the weather. Not you, perhaps.
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John H Williams: That's an easy answer: never.
If you want more channels, there is a service for you, it's called Freesat. See Compare all free TV channels in the UK to see the channels in a comparison.
Freesat is specifically designed to bring more TV to the places that Freeview cannot reach.
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john Martin: As you said, there is an extra fee on top of everything that is advertised on TV, this is how you fund those broadcasters with adverts.
Or do you think "advertisers" send money to the TV companies out of the goodness of their collective hearts?
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Fred Perkins: "The BBC happens to be an easy target because of the sheer scale of its operations. But again, they don't have a monopoly on being the brunt of media attack, as almost every broadcaster will be aware. "
Did you see this, perchance?
The BBC is but a pin-prick compared to Apple, Microsoft, Google etc.
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Vic: " it was hyped as a free service for life"
I would be very interested if you could please provide a link for that assertion?
However, as far as I can tell, when the 700MHz band is cleared, the corporations getting the new bands for 4G will have to fund new TV aerials for those places where they are required, as well as the (tiny number of) 4G co-band interference (as with 4Gat800).
Worth remembering that under the tax system (for example) capital hardware is written off after three years. The changes are not going to mean new receiver equipment, certainly not for the PSB channels, and as I said wideband aerials will be funded.
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Sunday 7 December 2014 10:43PM
MikeP: Really sorry to hear that.
The problem you have sounds more like a "video driver problem", rather than a web page issue - you shouldn't be able to display another pages text even if you wanted to!
I've got this page open in Firefox 34.0, Safari 5.1.7, IE11 and Chrome 40.0 on Windows 7 Ultimate and I can't replicate the problem.
Also the same bunch of browsers on Windows 10.
We've also been testing on an iPad with Safari/iOS8, iPhone 5with Safari/iOS8 as well as Android 5.0 Chrome on Nexus 4 and a Nexus 7.
There is a one-minute timer event that refreshes the "update bar" at the top of the page (only if it in the "closed state") and that doesn't cause the rest of the page to change.
I'm a bit of a loss to know what to suggest, unless you've got an ad-blocker or Anti-virus that is doing something odd perhaps?
I'm using New Relic to get Browser errors, but I've looked and I can't see anything there at the moment.