A Eng Funds no.21 September 1988

Another BBC photo from a couple of decades ago! There's me in the back row. Mark Chambers (rear left) and I shared a flat - he worked in OBs at Kendal Avenue. Tim Cowin (between me and Mark) worked in Radio and Jim Binks (below Tim) now works at EMS.
Anyone else you know?

Electronics Graphics area from 1991

I was going through some old photos from work - this is BBC White City's first electronic graphics suite - you can see a couple of original series Quantel Paintboxes (the 6U one with the brown front panel that looked like every other Quantel box of the eighties!), Sony DXC3000 camera (their first broadcast CCD model), Questech Charisma (two channels, IIRC - not the curvy effect model), Abekas A64 disk recorder (sixty seconds of video!), Ampex Ace 200 edit controller, three BetaSP decks and a Revox 1/4" tape machine.
This was the first area I had a hand in - possibly my start in Systems Integration. We had the DVE, Quantels and A64 hooked up to each other over a 4x4 601 matrix - 8 bit digital video over 25-pin D-types so it was possible to do lossless bouncing between those gadgets.

Joe was on Question Time

The Schools Question Time programme is the final product of a far wider education initiative to help schools nationwide by supporting the citizenship curriculum, helping improve students' public speaking and listening skills and engaging young people in society and politics.

Schools across the UK, with pupils aged 14-19, were eligible to enter the challenge.

Memories of Lime Grove

I was recently supervising a job in White City and took a lunch-break to wander around the market and down to Lime Grove (the first studios I worked at when I joined the Beeb in the eighties). Of course it's all been redeveloped as housing but it was nice to see the fashion college and primary school across the road.

Martin Kempton's site is excellent and will easily kill an hour of work-time! See his pages on Television Centre.

The move of the VT department to stage 5 did not take place immediately. They had to wait for a new tape format to be established before equipping all the suites. This format was the D3 cassette. Developed by Panasonic, the BBC was its first major customer. A few suites were opened in 1991 and used for training but the big move to stage 5 happened in January 1992.

The BBC's post production department had been created in 1989 - combining film editing with VT editing and sound dubbing. This new department was, as its name suggests, more concerned with what happens to the programme after it has been made rather than during it. From 1991, the new D3 cassette enabled each of the studios to be equipped with its own machines which were (and are) operated by the studio resource manager.

Couple of BBC iPlayer stories

BBC and ISPs clash over iPlayer

ISPs say the on-demand TV service is putting strain on their networks, which need to be upgraded to cope.

This is so rich - ISPs moaning about the fact that they have sold themselves short. Now the Beeb pay Akamai (and other peering partners, I'm sure) for every gigabit of iPlayer data that leaves White City and then I pay my ISP for my 4meg uncapped connection - currently £25 per month which I don't resent. The ISPs have peering arrangements with backbone providers so that they don't actually pay for aggregate bandwidth between those higher echelons of the internet. What it comes down to is that they have sold people on faster-than-they-are-willing-to-provide connectivity and now they have to stand by those promises.

BBC announces Nintendo Wii deal

The video download and streaming service that lets people catch up with BBC programmes will soon be a channel on the hugely popular game console.

Wow - what a fantastic coming-together of technology. You could have yourself an iPlayer set-top box for £180 (aside from the huge fun you get from the Wii) - that is the kind of things that will mean that video-on-demand will really penetrate and I'm thankful that it's the Beeb. After all they made DVB-T a reality in this country (ITV couldn't/wouldn't sustain OnDigital) and if this keeps Murdoch out of the space then so much the better.

Jack Johnson on BBC Radio 2's Music Club

Radio stations taking space on the tele! Whatever next? I culled this from the BBC Freeview interactive service a few weeks ago.

Where I lead the BBC follow!

I spent hours last year re-cutting episodes of Torchwood so that my kids could watch it - they are monster Dr Who fans and were devistated when they realised that the spin-off was going out after the water-shed. Anyhow - click the link in this entry's title for details of my workflow.
I was very pleased to see that the BBC are now doing it for me! By the end of season one I was knocking out a dozen DVDs per week to keep up with the demands of school friends!

BBC iPlayer on my TV

Looking good - once again the beeb show the way. Colour TV, Teletext, Nicam, DAB, DVB-T, HD-television and now IP-TV.
The BBC have either introduced or made successful every innovation in broadcasting.
If you consider how they managed to turn around the fate of DVB-T (OnDigital becoming Freview) and how good their IP-TV offering is in the face of Channel Four and Five's offering you realise it is imperative that we have a BBC.

Celebrities - just like the rest (or worst!) of us.

I was working in an edit suite recently and overheard a well known TV personality making a call to book train tickets. They wanted to go to Glasgow first class (hey, if you've got the cash why not travel in comfort?) but booking four tickets (around the same table) so that...

...I don't have to sit next to any common people

Now, this person has a column in The Independent and presents themselves as fair-minded, liberal, person-of-the-people in their writing/TV presenting!

One celeb I've got a bit of experience of is Jeremy Paxman - In the late eighties I was working as a maintenance engineer in BBC Television News and was doing the late shift one night (essentially what was the Nine O'clock News and then Newsnight) and was on the studio floor in Studio Two, BBC Television Centre trying to fix Paxman's 'cought-cut' (a button on a long cable that the newsreader keeps to hand to momentarily mute his microphone if he has a coughing fit). Not really noticing the time and my brain having long blanked out the seemingly unending re-cueing of the theme music over the studio's monitors I didn't realise that while scrabbling about under the programme desk the Studio Manager had counted the crew down for the live transmission. As I emerged from under the desk by Paxman's legs he put a gentle yet very firm hand on my head and pushed me back under the table-top and as he finished delivering his piece to camera introducing the first report on video tape he let go and said with a broad grin "you didn't know we were on the air, did you?" - what a gentleman! Not at all like the media-types I have to deal with nowadays.

Paxman anecdote no.2

One of the guys who was an engineer on my team used to do a monthly comic strip featuring the adventures of "Paxman" - a caped crusader who always won the day with his hard-questioning of politicians(!) - The strip would get photo-copied and put up on staff noticeboards around the building (the days before the web!) - eventually the weight of 'stop abusing the noticeboards' emails meant my colleague stopped the cartoon. One day a few months later another colleague had to go and fix the vt100 terminal in Paxman's office and noticed the complete set of cartoons on his pinboard.

Quantel eQ

In the eighties (when I was working in engineering at BBC Television News) I was in post-production maintenance with responsibility for (amoungst other things) a bunch of origional series Quantel Paintboxes (they became ¨Classic Paintboxes¨ when the V-Series hardware was launched). I knew those things inside-out. They were so elegantly designed and logically laid out that maintaining them was a joy and I could figure out which board had a fault in a couple of minutes and get it down to the chip in twenty.
After I left the Beeb I had virtually no dealings with Quantel. I used to see them at trade shows but it's always hard getting past the marketing to see what the real engineering is. They've regularly published a little book called The Quantel Digital Fact Book (which should, in truth, have been called The Quantel Digital Lie Book!) - essentially it was a bunch of marketing spun up to look like engineering. One article entitled ¨Resolution Independence - a universal panacea?¨ banged on about how a single platform couldn't support differing TV standards properly. They dropped that particular bit of fiction when they introduced resolution independent equipment! The superiority of 8-bit video was another myth they propogated (and I heard a number of otherwise sensible Soho engineers repeat that bit of nonsense) - again, they stopped saying that when their kit started to do 10-bit.
Anyhow - last week I was installing an eQ workstation and made a few suprising observations;

• It's now a PC! They use an industry standard Intel server board (dual Xeons) with commodity drives (SATA) and graphics card (Radeon X800).
• The video i/o card is bought in - although I couldn't get a good look at it I'm pretty sure it was a DVS Centurus card - as used in Clipsters, Baselights etc.
• I saw an AMC sticker inside - we've used those guys to integrate specialised computers for us - they do a good job but I was suprised to see them building Quantel machines!
• They include all of the extenders you might need to get USB and SVGA to the suite - it's nice to see that they still cling to the notion that equipment belongs in a machine room and people in the edit suite - Avid would do well to learn this!

Although the eQ in question had a fault and I didn't get to see it running reliably it does seem that Quantel (although having gone to commodity hardware even more so than Avid) take seriously the idea of a professional application. It seemed snappy, launching quickly and responding really well. I suppose it your heritage is in expensive hardware that was built for one job only you have a good set of pointers.

The old BBC News ticker

This is my favourite desktop widget of all time - it just provides a ticker of the top twenty or so BBC News stories - click on an interesting one and it fetches the web page. The Beeb stopped offering it for download a couple of years ago but I've been re-installing the last version I snagged on many machines and it still works a treat - don't be put off by the warning about it being for Windows 95 or NT 4.
It is very configurable wrt genres etc. Click the link above for the Windows installer. It has a very low memory/performance footprint (I've even got it running on a 400Mhz P2!).

Ancient BBC proverb

If you can see it and hear it - there's scope for future economy.

They've got big salaries to pay, you know.

BBC and the problems in Burma

www.handinhandforasia.org.uk is the charity my Sarah works for - flail on over to the site and check it out.
Anyhow - the Beeb are the only people who keep the hideous situation in Burma on the agenda. The consistently run articles on their site, carry reports on the radio and packages on the news when there are developments. The most recent clip from the ten o'clock news in on the Hand in Hand site at reasonable resolution, but I thought I'd post it here in the transcode I use on my 'phone.
In the same way that we all know the electronic media is inherently more trustworthy than print media I think the Beeb is inherently more trustworthy than commercial news outlets - definitely ones owned by Fox/Sky/Murdoch.
The WeMedia conference had a lot about this.
There are numerous examples of democracy activists saying how important the BBC is, here is a bit from Hansard in 1996, the quote is by Robin Cook;

President Mandela said of his years in prison: "what we really wanted was the BBC World Service".
Would not the week of President Mandela's state visit be a good time to tell John Birt to drop the proposals that threaten the distinctive ethos of the BBC World Service that has given comfort to supporters of democracy around the world and brought respect for Britain from the world?

Old BBC document

Here's a BBC document that dates from 1958 and details various BBC engineering firsts - really interesting as there is a bit of an expose of VERA - the Beeb's own video recording system that they were using a couple of years before Ampex launched Quadruplex in form of the VR-1000.
It struck me that most of the content is similair to the state of the industry when I started in the eighties and fundamentally different from how the industry is now. When I started digital video was only just being talked about (I didn't see a digital VTR for a few years - D1 & D2 took a while to find wide acceptance at the Beeb) and all distribution etc. was analogue.
There are even some good atists impressions of the yet-to-be built Television Centre!

Why we need the BBC and why the license fee is a good thing
Despite the whinging of the Murdock-controlled tabloid-media(see below) we do need a strong BBC. A couple of days back the Beeb revealed the increase they expect to see in the license fee. Who else is pushing digital terrestrial TV in the country? Who else is pushing radio (and soon TV)-on-demand? Who else will offer a decent archive of publicly accessible content? Not ITV, that's for sure. The Beeb have a long history of technical innovation in content delivery and we can't afford to loose that. Freeview would have disappeared but for the Beeb's intervention (much to the chagrin of Sky).
I watched a couple of BBC3 shows this week - Tiny Tearaways is their child behavior meets Big Brother show. That makes it sound awful but in the face of the kind of thing ITV offers - Children out of control or somesuch (probably with "from hell" in the title!) it is a joy - really life-affirming and offering good and practical instruction to parents (and my chum Martin Begley works on that show).
Spendaholics documents the profligate behavior of young adults and the stupid financial choices they make. Most of the show is taken up with realistic financial and psychological advise putting this week's subject back on track to being solvent. Again, the things I've seen on ITV offer no way out and glorify the choices of the chav generation.
The BBC offers remarkable value for money when compared to Sky and the ITV network. If you compare the £140 per annum cost of the BBC license fee with the cost of even the most modest Sky package or the £350 that the cost of ITV-based advertising places on the average family's annual grocery bill then you realise that the license fee is less of a tax than having to fund ITV. I have a choice if I pay the license fee - I do because I value the Beeb but I have several friends who don't have a TV in the house and so don't have to pay for the BBC but they do have to pay for ITV regardless.

footnote - The article in The Sun I linked to describes some BBC staff going to the IBC conference in Amsterdam. It is the biggest trade show for the industry outside of NAB in Vegas and the BBC would be remiss if they didn't send a few people to it. Root6 sent about a dozen folks this year as we feel it's important to stay ahead of the game. You gotta hate The Sun and all the lies it peddles.