- Jamie Donald
- 23 Jan 07, 12:56 PM
I’m not a tennis fan, nor do I support Scotland when it comes to sport, but I have to stand up for the schedulers on Â鶹ԼÅÄ2 who pulled The Daily Politics (and Working Lunch) yesterday to show the up and coming British tennis star Andy Murray try to defeat Raphael Nadal in the fourth round of the Australian Open.
I know many fans of the programmes were upset: First, because The Daily Politics was delayed with a promise to show it after the tennis; second, because it was then dropped when the match went to five sets over four hours. I was sorry too. We had the programme all ready to go, and then pre-recorded it when it became clear our guests couldn’t stay. It included a great interview by Andrew Neil with Phil Woolas, the minister for communities, about the above inflation increases to the council tax (though you can watch it by clicking here) . It also included a film about Edward Heath in our ‘favourite post war prime minister’ (watch that here), followed by an impression of the great man by the founder of Yo Sushi, Simon Woodruffe who was our guest of the day (watch that here).
But the schedulers were right to pull us for the tennis. We draw an average audience on a Monday of a quarter of a million for the Daily Politics. At noon, the tennis had an average audience of nearly a million. And it turned into a very exciting match, with Murray taking Nadal – the undisputed number two in the world – all the way. By the end over a million and a half viewers were cheering for . We value sport at the Â鶹ԼÅÄ as much as politics, and while we at the Daily Politics can get on every day a match like yesterday’s doesn’t come along very often. Do you agree?
Some of you have suggested that we and the schedulers could have come up with some more creative solution to allow both programmes to be scheduled somewhere on the Â鶹ԼÅÄ â€“ one was to break into the tennis for half an hour; another was to offer it on the red button; a third to make use of the digital Â鶹ԼÅÄ3 and Â鶹ԼÅÄ4 during the day.
Again, what’s your view: the schedulers will be reading this too.
Jamie Donald is editor of live political programmes
- Steve Herrmann
- 23 Jan 07, 10:34 AM
We launched a new-look audio/video player on the News, Sport and Weather sites last week. I wrote about the changes here beforehand and have had lots of feedback from you since – thanks to all who’ve commented.
Three of the main themes in your comments were: why don’t we link to relevant text stories from video clips, why don’t we use Flash for video, and what is our view of open standards. I’ve posted replies to these below...
• Daniel wrote saying, “can I suggest that when you have a link to a video or audio news story you also provide a link to the written story as well…â€
Many of the video clips on the News website are associated with text stories – so you launch the video from inside a story page - text and video are therefore tied together. But we also promote individual video clips in their own right when the video itself is particularly noteworthy – so for example today on the front page we’ve had the UK Ministry of Defence footage of a dramatic Royal Marine rescue in Afghanistan. In such cases there’s usually also a text on the site which tells the story and also contains the video clip.
So those who prefer reading to watching (or who can’t watch because their PC isn’t set up for it) are not being deprived of the story. It’s just that in the video promotion slots on the front page we don’t as a rule put in additional links to the text stories, because we reckon you’ll be able to find them elsewhere on the site. But your feedback on this point has given us something to think about.
(I've asked Kevin Hinde from our technical team to help answer the following questions...)
• A number of people asked "why don't you use Flash?
"The Â鶹ԼÅÄ is trying to make its video available to the widest possible audience. This means that when we choose the formats in which to stream our audio and video clips and live programmes, we have to take account of: All the operating systems in use, and the number of people who use them (this is not just desktop operating systems - we need to take account of mobiles too); whether a player is available for that format on a particular operating system; and whether it is easy to play that video on an operating system.
"For popular operating systems we want to make sure that our video can be seen by non-expert users who would be unwilling or unable to install extra software or plug-ins. People in offices are also often unable to install extra software.
"Video quality and compression rates are obviously very important to us. We must provide good value for the licence payer so cost is a factor - we have to invest in infrastructure and licences for encoding and streaming servers, and in bandwidth.
"So why don't we make our clips available in Flash? It has been possible to deliver video in Flash since version 6 but it was not until version 8 that it got good enough for us to consider using it - early versions had lip sync problems with longer clips and the codecs gave poor quality and compression rates compared to Real and Windows Media. According to , 89% of PCs using the Internet in the UK, Canada, USA, Germany, France and Japan have Flash 8 or above so it does well on the criteria above.
"The plain answer is that the timing did not work well for us. YouTube launched in 2005, the same year as Flash 8, they started with a clean slate and that's what they chose. The Â鶹ԼÅÄ has been providing streamed video since 1997 so we have already made a huge investment in Real and Windows infrastructure. We think that our current choice of formats does pretty well: Windows Media Player is widely available, it is installed by default on new Windows machines, and for many users it is the only option; Real Player is available as an alternative, and for platforms which do not support Windows Media; The video quality at the bitrates we use is excellent in both codecs.
"But of course, things change, and we are always looking at the right way to move forward. We do use Flash video in some places on the Â鶹ԼÅÄ site, but we're not able to do it for news clips yet.
"Also - Real make a special of their Windows player for us with the commercial extras removed. And we know that Macs with the Flip4Mac plug-in have problems with our Windows Media streams - we are looking into it."
• Several posters asked why we do not support open standards.
"It is important to distinguish between different kinds of open. Standards like are open in the sense that they are not owned by a single company, not in the sense for just anyone to contribute to the standard or in the sense that it is possible to implement the standard without royalty fees or licensing terms. Standards like and are patent free.
"Proprietary media players may choose not to support open standards fully, whether the standard is patent free or not, because of licensing or other business reasons. There are open source players which support an incredible range of open and proprietary standards but we cannot rely on our users being able to install a particular open source video player. We will be very happy to make our streamed clips available in an open standard as soon as the right combination of player support, streaming server support, and codec quality means that it would let us tick more of the boxes. We regularly look at this and there is nothing yet which is compelling enough for us to make the jump.
("For info, the Dirac project aims to produce a wavelet-based video coding algorithm suitable for open source implementation but it is not ready for use in production and we're looking for people who can .")
Thanks to Kevin for that. Finally... some posts mention the Â鶹ԼÅÄ's iPlayer project, which is a related but different thing - it's a project that would allow you to catch up on Â鶹ԼÅÄ programmes you have missed, similar to . It is currently in the middle of a public value test.
Steve Herrmann is editor of the
The Guardian: Reports on a speech made by Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre criticising the Â鶹ԼÅÄ. ()
Daily Mail: Columnist Richard Kay comments on the Â鶹ԼÅÄ chairman vacancy. ()
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