Interesting Stuff 2008-10-03
Post categories: round up
|11:55 UK time, Friday, 3 October 2008
James Cridland's post on bit rates, radio streaming and Coyopa on Radio Labs has provoked what Bill McLaren might call some "argy bargy". digitalradiotechsays:
Let's get this straight: what I'm asking for here is that the BBC should provide *the same* quality on its live Internet radio streams as most of the big UK commercial radio stations have been using for their Internet streams for almost 2 years now - i.e. using a bit rate of 128 kbps. And you're actually trying to suggest that it's me that's being unreasonable? Get real.
Commercial radio's Nick Piggott (who recently spoke at a conference with James) responds:
Despite GCap Media being the largest commercial radio operator in the UK, the overall streaming volumes are significantly lower than those of the BBC, so the overall bandwidth requirements (both peered and transit) are far lower. The audience is predominately based in the UK, which means it's realistic to peer directly with ISPs who account for the vast majority of the traffic.... Secondly, the streams are only available in Microsoft Windows Media format at 128kbit/s, and use Microsoft's own Intelligent Streaming technology to automatically scale to the available bandwidth. This means that devices that are unaware of Intelligent Streaming (including many WiFi radios) can only receive a 32kbit/s stream, as will Windows Media Player if it determines that network conditions are unreliable.
What to do about broadband? If this is a question you ponder, read this from the Register.
Last week, I went to a fascinating presentation in the very bowels of Broadcasting House: research on Fan Cultures in radio online and it's great to see it being showcased on the BBC Radio Labs blog.
BBC Global News (and BBC World Service) has announced plans for many more YouTube channels.
Rain Ashford from BBC Backstage (and blogged by our blogger-in-residence Steve Bowbrick) reports back from Nesta's "Art of Innovation" event.
Deceptive Resolution has an idea about the BBCiPlayer. mloughran at getsatisfaction has another.
And despite the fact that viewing is a little restricted, Chris Plowman is still pleased (NB: content linked to contains very strong language).
Nick Reynolds is editor, BBC Internet Blog (and he's not sure yet about the new series of Heroes).
Comment number 1.
At 18:35 4th Oct 2008, digitalradiotech wrote:But Nick Piggott didn't explain why the BBC couldn't provide the 128 kbps Internet streams that GCap have been providing for almost 2 years now - which was the point I was making.
For example, even if the BBC is concerned about the reliability of higher bit rate streams, they could still provide "Normal" and "High" buttons for lower and higher bit rate streams - just like on the iPlayer TV streams. Nick going on about the BBC's higher bandwidth requirement doesn't alter that fact.
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Comment number 2.
At 04:43 9th Sep 2009, felicioo wrote:This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.
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