FWIW: The BBC World Service has no plans to drop Real or Windows Media support on any of it's language services. The narrowband services are still valuable to our listeners around the world, and our relatively modern infrastructure means its no more difficult for us to stream a megabyte of Real than it is the stream a megabyte of Windows Media or AAC. We will continue to roll out AAC support to the remaining language sites as they are being refreshed, retaining the Real and Windows Media support as we go.
-- Gareth Davis | Production Systems Specialist World Service Future Media, Digital Delivery Team - Part of BBC Global News Division * http://www.bbcworldservice.com/ <http://www.bbcworldservice.com/> * 702NE Bush House, Strand, London, WC2B 4PH * 02 71285 (internal) * +44 (0)20 7557 1285 (external) * gareth.da...@bbc.co.uk ________________________________ From: owner-backst...@lists.bbc.co.uk [mailto:owner-backst...@lists.bbc.co.uk] On Behalf Of John O'Donovan Sent: 07 September 2009 00:39 To: backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk Subject: RE: [backstage] RealAudio for local radio - gone missing? Hi Andrew, generally these streams won't be available as RealAudio in the future. As you will no doubt have seen, the BBC is reducing it's dependency on Real Media as a delivery mechanism, though it will still be supported. Coyopa was designed to meet the needs of centralised National Radio rather than Local Radio and the distribution problems, source quality and encoding issues for Local Radio are very different, complicated and expensive to develop. Local Radio is still dependent on gathering the streams through a variety of methods and encoding at an aggregation point, and this aggregation point is at capacity at the moment. Cheers, jod ________________________________ From: owner-backst...@lists.bbc.co.uk [mailto:owner-backst...@lists.bbc.co.uk] On Behalf Of adancy+backst...@gmail.com Sent: 04 September 2009 16:50 To: backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk Subject: Re: [backstage] RealAudio for local radio - gone missing? Can someone from the Beeb clarify that the Windows streams will be *instead* of Real, as the implication of that article (and also a number of blog comments from James Cridland in the past) was that Windows Media streams would be in *addition* to the existing streams. >From what I understand one of the big reasons behind the Coyopa project was that it's relatively easy for you to produce the same audio in multiple formats, so it seems a bit odd that you're replacing one format with another. Certainly there's still demand for RealAudio - I'm regularly seeing several hundred people a day using the RealAudio listen again links and widgets on my site, and I'm pretty sure other similar sites like Beebotron must have the same if not greater traffic for their RealAudio links. It's a particular problem with internet radios and mobile devices, as many of them don't support the AAC format you're now using for live streams and can't access the MP3 files you're now using for local radio Listen Again due to the content delivery system completely obsfuscating the URLs. Andrew Dancy www.iplayerconverter.co.uk <http://www.iplayerconverter.co.uk> (apologies if this appears twice - fun and games with gmail and their silly 'on behalf of' header) ________________________________ From: owner-backst...@lists.bbc.co.uk [mailto:owner-backst...@lists.bbc.co.uk] On Behalf Of Gavin Johnson Sent: 04 September 2009 14:42 To: backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk Subject: Re: [backstage] RealAudio for local radio - gone missing? Ok so it turns out that a dual bitrate option will continue to be available, but in Windows rather than Real. So that link is temporarily broken while things are being moved around. There's some useful background here. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2009/08/improvements_to_bbc_local _radi.html On 04/09/2009 13:50, "Gavin Johnson" <gavin.john...@bbc.co.uk> wrote: As of Tuesday there is no longer a dual bitrate option. It looks like iplayer haven't caught up. Thanks for noticing, I'll give someone a nudge about getting the link removed. Gavin On 04/09/2009 12:43, "Paul Webster" <p...@dabdig.com> wrote: What has happened to the RealAudio feeds of the local radio (BBC London in particular) Listen Again content? As an example http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0046fbf/Danny_Baker_03_09_2009/ choose the pop-out player - and then low bandwidth ... "Danny Baker: 03/09/2009 is unavailable at this time." Paul Webster - 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/
