Christopher Woods wrote: > However, as the infrastructure is already there for UK > streaming, with minimal extra expenditure required to provide > this simulcast higher bitrate service, and with every UK > taxpayer funding the WS in some small form, how come the > Powers That Be have defined it as something not appropriate > for the WS to rollout? > > The inappropriate argument may have held water four or five > years ago, but is increasingly irrelevant these days.
There are actually 2 problems here: The first is stupidly complicated, and I'm not sure I understand it all fully. But it boils down to the fact that we cannot spend grant in aid funds on a service targeted exclusively at the UK. A high bitrate stream using the existing BBC infrastructure GeoIP locked to the UK would be the wrong side of the rules, as we would have to pay BBC Technology/Siemens grant in aid money to provide the UK exclusive service. Even if the funding rules were not in place, I imagine there would be objections on editorial grounds to restricting access to our services. The second reason, is that the BBC Streaming Infrastructure was never really designed for delivering high bitrate streams outside the UK if we were to make them universally available. The last few servers the BBC had in New York were shut down a while back, so there are now no BBC servers outside the UK. So to launch a global high bitrate service could potentially have quality of service issues. This is actually the real hurdle to increasing the bitrates, rather than anything else. As it happens we will have completed migrating our radio and on-demand playout to an external CDN when the schedules change at the end of BST, so this solves the infrastructure problem. Once we have the minor detail of launching Persian TV out of the way, we will be looking at making additional formats and bitrates available - but in a way that does not affect those that still need the narrowband Real/Windows offerings. -- Gareth Davis | Production Systems Specialist World Service Future Media, Digital Delivery Team - Part of BBC Global News Division * http://www.bbcworldservice.com/ * 702NE Bush House, Strand, London, WC2B 4PH - 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/
