Thanks everyone for the feedback and if you get the experiment to work for you please feel free to comment via the blog. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radio3/posts/BBC-Proms-in-Surround-Sound
To provide a bit more detail to the biggest concern within this group, which seems to be around universality. When the BBC first started F.M. transmissions most people couldn't receive them and it took about 20 years for the majority of listening to move from A.M. Does this mean we were wrong to spend license payers money on F.M.? Yes, it is frustrating that the adoption of HTML5 and the Audio API & Media Source Extension within it has been very slow and so far only Chrome and IE11 fully support it. It's also frustrating that the combination of Chrome and Apple seems to make the audio come from the wrong speakers so people have to replug. But it's only through content creators making content available using these standards that the browser makers will be persuaded to implement them. I would love to be able to offer surround sound radio over the TV but I would need to pay for the correct data feeds to be created to get the content into the EPG, without which nobody would find the content. I would need to pay Red Bee to add the data to the EPG, I would need to pay somebody to get 4 channels of full bandwidth uncompressed audio synchronously from the Royal Albert Hall to our two coding and multiplexing centres, I would need to pay Atos to provide additional capability at those centres to code an audio only surround sound service and add it to the multiplex and I would need to take bandwidth away from other services to make space for my new service. With the Commonwealth Games about to begin, I'm not going to get that bandwidth. And even if I could do all that, there's no guarantee it would work - from informal conversations with manufacturers I don't think TVs cope with audio only surround sound services. Of course most TVs now are "Smart" TVs with an IP connection and a web browser. Given that most people who have a surround sound system have it connected to their TV I think it's important that I find a way to deliver surround sound radio to the TV and as I can't do it through the broadcast channels, the browser is the best bet. Of course the browsers in TVs, set top boxes and blue-ray players don't yet support HTML5 etc etc yet, but it's only a matter of time. The beauty of this approach is that once these standards are adopted within consumer products you will just need to click "play" on a web page on your TV to enjoy the service. Some people have commented that we should make a "normal" surround sound stream available but I'm not at all sure what they mean by this. For live streaming you need a codec and a transport layer. Our "normal" transport layers Flash and Shoutcast. Flash won't support more than stereo, Shoutcast can but support for this is very limited. MPEG-DASH, on the other hand, is rapidly becoming the standard way to transport streaming media over IP with more and more companies supporting it. If anybody would like to set up a demonstration of live streaming of surround content which will play natively in a browser using different technologies then please let me know. I'm not using MPEG-DASH to be difficult, I'm using it because we have figured out how to make it carry good quality surround sound reliably and play in the browser without third party plug-ins, and because it is an agreed standard which is widely supported. If any of you have a better way of doing that please share it! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/private/sursound/attachments/20140721/94574418/attachment.html> _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound - unsubscribe here, edit account or options, view archives and so on.
