June 2012 Archives

Today, the BBC launched an additional feature to its online live TV player. Live Restart allows for those situations where you join a programme midway through, only to wish you hadn’t missed the first ten minutes. With a single click on a large purple button, you can switch to a timeshifted replay of the programme from the start. If even that’s not good enough for you, you can ‘rewind’ up to two hours of television.

Live rewind is nothing new for users of Sky+ or other, similar devices — but generally their replay buffer only goes as far back as you have been watching a particular channel, or further if you’d already set the show to be recorded.The new BBC service doesn’t depend on you having watched a programme already, but instead relies on advances in internet transmission systems which make it a lot easier for the BBC to record its outgoing video data.

For the tech-heads amongst you (by which, I mean me and anyone else as nerdy as I am), the BBC’s Henry Webster goes into some of the details on the BBC Internet Blog:

The technology that allows us to offer this new functionality is part of a wider strategic move to embrace HTTP chunked streaming for delivering our online video.

Instead of using a point-to-point streaming protocol such as RTMP as we have done in the past, this method breaks up the H.264 video into chunks and delivers them as HTTP packets in much the same way as the we deliver our text rich web pages today.

… The live restart functionality that we are launching on the iPlayer today is typical of the cool new interactive features that we can drive using HTTP streaming.

As we can keep all the video chunks as we distribute them, we can offer them to be viewed again later, or even store them more permanently.

… To do this we have linked up the programme schedule data with a rewind-able live stream which means, where rights allow, that you should easily be able to navigate back to the start of the currently live programme, pause and resume a live stream or look back at anything that happened in the last two hours.

The key phrase in that last paragraph will, I suspect, turn out to be “where rights allow”. Live streaming of a current TV channel and iPlayer availability post-transmission do seem to often be subject to different contracts. That’s all well and good when watching live, or watching iPlayer, are two discrete operations by the viewer — but if the BBC’s new techniques catch on, there are all sorts of implications.

Not least of these is the implication for liability for paying the licence fee. As it stands, to watch live simulcasts of TV channels requires a valid TV Licence, whereas watching iPlayer does not. With this new hybrid system, where does the licence fee requirement kick in? The fact that this question can even be asked shows how outdated the licence fee system is becoming in the age of increased online watching.

• Read the BBC’s press release about Live Restart

Anybody who’s listened to Radio 4 (or 4 Extra, or watched BBC2 or BBC4) at all over the last couple of weeks can’t have escaped the trailers promoting tomorrow’s Ulysses adaptation.

James Joyce’s literary masterpiece is one book I’ve never managed to read. Its 265,000 word count would be intimidating enough, but Joyce’s use of different styles — including some chapters written in a stream-of-conscious style, and one written as a play script. The tale of a day in the life of Dubliner Leopold Bloom, his philandering wife Molly, and writer Stephen Dedalus — often taken to be an alter ego of Joyce himself — is celebrated each year on “Bloomsday”, June 16, the day on which the book’s events unfold.

To mark the occasion, Radio 4 is devoting much of Saturday’s output to a new dramatisation of the work, starting at 9.10am within Saturday Live and concluding just before midnight. The BBC has assembled a great cast: Henry Goodman as Bloom, Niamh Cusack as Molly, Andrew Scott as Dedalus and with Stephen Rea narrating.

I’m not usually a fan of having a narrator in a radio adaptation of a novel - too many a production has been marred by dumping chunks of dull exposition into the narrator’s mouth, rather than finding ways for the drama to extend out of the characters. For Ulysses, though, getting rid of the narrator would be criminal: there’s poetry in every line, and Rea’s warm presence throughout the day is a comforting guide to those who, like me, are coming to the characters and situations within the drama for the first time.

After getting a preview copy of all seven parts last week, I’ve devoured them — I’m currently about two-thirds of my way through listening to the whole thing for a second time. All the episodes will be available as MP3 downloads after transmission, and it’s really worth taking the time to download them.

The BBC’s website for this project also has some great supporting material, including interviews with the cast and creative teams behind this production. After Matt expressed his justifiable frustration with BBC television’s arts commissions yesterday, it’s worth noting that when the Corporation gets it right, as it has done with Ulysses, it’s unbeatable.

Today the BBC held what it described on an invitation as its “annual arts and music television briefing”. And giving its annual nature, you might expect the Corporation had called the two-hour launch event in order to highlight its ambitions for the next year and, of course, announce plenty of exciting new arts commissions for its channels.

Sadly, none of the shows announced (of which there were far from plenty) are ones that, to my mind anyway, can be labelled exciting, and, perhaps more worryingly, arts shows.

There’s The Genius of Josiah Wedgwood, about “the story of the man who revolutionised English pottery” (which sounds to me like a heritage programme), and then there’s Northern Italy Unpacked, which will look at “the art, culinary culture, and landscape of the north” (which sounds to me like it will be a travel and/or cookery programme).

The History of the World in Three Colours which explores how the colours gold, blue and white have “changed the way we behave and even altered the course of history”, while David Dimbleby will explore “the rich heritage of Britain’s maritime arts and culture” from the comfort of his own boat.

Now I may be wrong, but shouldn’t arts include programmes about music, dance and theatre?