Slashdot Mirror
BBC Reopens Ogg Streams
garf writes: "Once again, back by popular demand, the BBC has opened up live streaming of Radio 4, to test with the new codecs, especially for modem users. Hop over here.
And for those wishing to listen to Radio 1 try these (link one),
(link two).
But beware: '[Radio 1 streams] are available sporadically at the moment. Don't be surprised if it cuts off, as I've probably just killed it ready for restarting with different settings.'
Please email support to the BBC for their continued support for the ogg format. Happy listening."
NPR should do this since they're kind of the "GNU/Linux" of the radio world. Instead, they only offer support for QuickTime, RealPlayer, and Windows Media streams.
In my opinion, National Public Radio (whose mission is to aid the growth and development of noncommercial radio) should definitely be supporting an open audio standard such as Ogg Vorbis.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
That's like testing a car for highway safety with a hydrogen bomb, you know.
"It's not a war on drugs, it's a war on personal freedom. Keep that in mind at all times." Bill Hicks
Even lame supports ogg coding through libogg.
merkac
Cool, but useless.
I like the fact that large companies are taking to this standard for media, I have just started using linux much more and looked in my KDE to see that there was this ogg vorbis format, so I ripped a few of my cds with it, and am extremely happy with the result. I then did some research on it and found out that it was open, bonus.If someone can tell me of a portable player that can use this format, I will appreciate it! I would like a durable way to play my music without having to re-rip my songs.
I seriously don't think .ogg files will ever be able to reach the ascendancy of .mp3 files. The reason is aesthetic- .mp3 sounds slick and space-age, whereas .ogg sounds like egg and/or the noise of vomiting. I do not like eggs or vomit, and I would put neither into my computer.
This might seem like a minor quibble, but I would venture that it's the little things like this (design considerations) that distinguish popular products/formats from the scores of unpopular ones.
visit the hwky website for a lyrical genius infusion.
I'm glad to see this... MP3's have received so much attention, none of the other codecs haven't been in the news much. Sure, there's the random article comparing 4 or 5 codecs that no one's ever going to use, or the little articles saying that people hear an improvement in Ogg over MP3. But have you seen people using .ogg's? I do. Everything I've ripped is now in Ogg. Better quality, more flexibility, and a superior acoustic model.
I thought listening to the BBC over Ogg was cool. I remembered the first time I'd heard it over shortwave. Not to mention that it worked flawlessly. Then again, I'lve always got the latest plugin for my Winamp, and my XMMS. No annoying RealPlayer crap. No proprietary codecs. It works on my non-Windows boxes.
I sent a brief, yet eloquent note to the BBC webmaster when the original test completion was finished, and will probably send another encouraging this continued project. I would encourage the same from others.
Support your local hackers. (no, not crackers. hackers. Damn Hollywood crap.)
The previous ogg streaming by the BBC was excellent to say the least. 128Kbit Ogg gives stunning Quality for music and way more than you need for voice.
/. post work but they are not currently listed on the BBC page.
Unfortunately they are only doing Radio 1 at 64Kbit at the moment which is alot crisper than 64Kbit Mp3 but seems to mess up the treble more.
What is excellent is that you can save the stream to disk which must be the easiest way ever to record your favorite program.
The links for Radio 1 on the
The low bandwidth option runs at vbr around 50Kbit which means you will have to have a very good modem connection for it to work.
Please mail the BBC support about this as I really hate wma and real audio, plus they are inferiour and proprietry.
#! /bin/bash
/mnt/music/ogg/style/artist/album/track.ogg
# CD Ripper Script
# save tracks in
# Info
s=rock # style
n=11 # number of tracks
a=pink_floyd # artist
l=the_division_bell # album
d=1994 # date
t1=cluster_one.ogg
t2=what_do_you_want_from_me.ogg
t3=poles_apart.ogg
t4=marooned.ogg
t5=a_great_day_for_freedom.ogg
t6=wearing_the_inside_out.ogg
t7=take_it_back.ogg
t8=coming_back_to_life.ogg
t9=keep_talking.ogg
t10=lost_for_words.ogg
t11=high_hopes.ogg
# Directory management
music=/mnt/music/ogg
mkdir $music
cd $music
mkdir $s
cd $s
mkdir $a
cd $a
mkdir $l
cd $l
# CD Paranoia needs to search exhaustively for the SCSI-ATAPI CD-ROM, so use the -s switch
# Use -B (batch) mode to save each track in its own file
cdparanoia -s -B -- "1-$n"
# Compress with Ogg Vorbis
# This yields a compression ration of about 12 and sounds great when played with xmms
oggenc -o $t1 -a $a -l $l -d $d track01.cdda.wav
oggenc -o $t2 -a $a -l $l -d $d track02.cdda.wav
oggenc -o $t3 -a $a -l $l -d $d track03.cdda.wav
oggenc -o $t4 -a $a -l $l -d $d track04.cdda.wav
oggenc -o $t5 -a $a -l $l -d $d track05.cdda.wav
oggenc -o $t6 -a $a -l $l -d $d track06.cdda.wav
oggenc -o $t7 -a $a -l $l -d $d track07.cdda.wav
oggenc -o $t8 -a $a -l $l -d $d track08.cdda.wav
oggenc -o $t9 -a $a -l $l -d $d track09.cdda.wav
oggenc -o $t10 -a $a -l $l -d $d track10.cdda.wav
oggenc -o $t11 -a $a -l $l -d $d track11.cdda.wav
# Cleanup
rm *.wav
Primary ogg-related feedback address: oggfeedback@bbc.co.uk
The BBC itself has a pretty extensive feedback gathering mechanism: here are online feedback forms you can fill out:
Feedback form about the BBC website/services
Feedback form about BBC Radio
BBC News suggestions form
But remember: you can gush all you want about the BBC's OGG decision--but I have a feeling the BBC is more interested in how many people are actually tuning in. The best way to get this to stay up is to really listen... and it's worth doing, especially if you're in the US and want 15% less state propaganda in your news. I don't just mean now, as long as this story is on the /. homepage, but next week, too...
Perhaps on classical music it is worse, but I find that with heavy electronic music (Aphex Twin, Autechre, Squarepusher, etc), that OGG keeps the music much clearer than MP3. MP3 tends to mutilate hard core electronic music. OGG on the otherhand manages to produce better quality at a lower bitrate than MP3.
For Aphex Twin, I tend to find that unless the MP3 is 256kb or greater, I can hear the MP3 warbling. With OGG, 192 is enough that I can't distinguish from CD anymore.
Basically I've moved to OGG completely. I rip everything to OGG, and rarely use mp3s anymore. Since there is an official OGG plugin for winamp (Download Here), it's easy to just use OGG instead.
You're kidding right? Either that is one whopper of a troll, or you are a wannabe audiophile. *REAL* audiophiles would NEVER use those phrases.
That, and the compositions of Rachmoninoff aren't exactly sonically varied.
If you had put Schoenberg, Mahler or Shostakovich you would have had a little credibility. But Rachmoninoff?
If you are serious, go back and do an actual double blind test (something even real audiophiles have problems doing), then say you can 1) tell the difference between 256k mp3 and 256k ogg AND 2) conclusively say that ogg is worse.
Others who HAVE done this have reached completely different conclusions.
The same is true for all of these encoders.
... anything above that is a bonus.
The fact is, AIFF is absolutely great for digital audio. 24bit, 96khz, overkill.
None of these formats are designed to do anything more than provide acceptable quality over low bandwidth connections.
In circumstances where bandwidth is not a concern, there are far better encoding methods than MP3, Ogg, WMA, etc.
Don't get too stuck on the concept of encoding - it's just a means of overcoming a lack of bandwidth, not an attempt at providing superlative audio quality, though that could be considered a secondary concern in the design.
As long as the audio quality is decent, and the filesizes are low, then the encoder is doing the job it was designed to do
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Radio 2 = Easy Listening music + speak
Radio 3 = Classical
Radio 4 = Speak (mostly high-brow stuff)
Radio 5 (live) = News and Sport coverage with phone-ins etc. Not as high brow as R4.
This is my sig.
If only my Car's indash CD player supported OGG, I could be weaned from MP3. Alas, the Kenwood only supports MP3.
From http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/
Radio 1 The best new music (main stream crap music)
Radio 2 The nation's favourite (Crappy music, talk shows)
Radio 3 Live music and arts (Jazz and other 'wierd' music, talk shows)
Radio 4 Intelligent speech (LOTR Radio Play and the like, talk shows)
Radio 5 Live news - live sport
Radio Worldwide: News in 43 languages
Mlk
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
Honestly speaking commercial streaming providers are suffering from outragous fee charged for using proprietary codecs. My friend was surprise when RA charged them per *access*. Talking about *free* educational streaming-media website for charity...
Proprietary codec hurts the widespread of multi-media information exchange. WWW would not be the same if it started out as pay-per-acess. I can foresee free codec format could make a revolution, now we only need some big corps create the market drive.
*Hat off to BBC*
Trolling? Karma Whoring? Whatever it is, it seems you've spent to much energy trying to be creative and not enough realy thinking this through.
.ogg format. So what better way to introduce .ogg to a wider audience then to have BBC radio stream in .ogg format? So in a major way it is hoped that every "Tom, Dick and AC" jumps on this.
.02 euro"
Chapter 1: "Tom, Dick and AC"
Why is this an interesting story? Because a lot of us are interested, and would like others to be interested in the
Chapter 2: "handle the slashdot effect (very few have)"
As most of us know, this isn't the first time BBC radio has implemented a streaming radio service, more specifically not the first time on this project. They're aware that people are interested and I'm sure they're planning accordingly. If they're truly serious about this then I'm sure they've made provisions to scale hardware according to demand.
Chapter 3: "at the end of the day, BBC will think this is a bad idea"
When any service is initially introduced, you'll usually see disproportionately low or high traffic. Either way, the time immediately following the introduction is absolutely not when to judge your average traffic. This actually holds tru for many IT services. Anyone in the industry knows this, and I'm sure the BBC do as well.I'll assume this is not your line of work.
Chapter 4: "just my
While this could be considered creative, you've missed the mark. The BBC is a product of the United Kingdom. Denmark, Sweden and the United Kingdom are members of the European Union but are not currently participating in the single currency. Denmark, though, is a member of the Exchange Rate Mechanism II (ERM II), which means that the Danish krone is linked to the euro, although the exchange rate is not fixed.
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.
Reading the Webpage implies to me that this is one guy at the BBC being allowed to try this out for a limited period:
...
"Update (2002-01-21): Ok, slight bogon."
doesn't sound like the corporate face of the BBC talking!
So it could be that this will only get taken up properly by the BBC if they get positive feedback - they've got a mailing address just for this
R1-4 are national radio stations. Unlike NPR which consists of a lot of locally broadcast content (from what I recall I experienced when I lived in the US), BBC radio is the same everywhere, with a little local content. I was in the highlands of Scotland last summer, and all heard on R1 was continuous coverage of the lead up to the England-Germany world cup qualification match... hardly a word about Scotland-Croatia. The cool thing about national broadcasting is when you're driving around: as you go out of range of the transmitter, most modern car radios re-tune themselves to the new frequency and you don't get any interruptions!
R4 is probably the closest to NPR, from the perspective a British person in the UK. The World Service would probably be closer for an American listening in from overseas. As a British ex-pat, I like to listen to the World Service. The quality is generally very good with no advertising, nor any annoying fund-raising drives.
I've made a big assumption that you're American. Apologies if you're not. It might make sense to many other N.American readers though.
BBC radio is the same everywhere, with a little local content
Except for the 38 local staions in England and radios Scotland, alba, Wales Cymru Ulster and Foyle
The high quality stream has higher frequencies so you can easily hear the noise. The low quality stream clips this high frequency noise out. I actually prefer listening to the low quality stream.
Note that you need the latest Ogg release (RC3, download here) to play the streams; older versions didn't work for me. They seem to be using some features of Vorbis not available previously (e.g., the web page says, "I've decided to drop Radio 4 to a 32kHz samplerate and use the RC3 'quality' settings instead of enforcing an upper bitrate").
With RC3, things are working beautifully. Good to see such support for an open, free standard.
Kudos to the BBC for being innovative and trying something new. As a Scot living in England, I listen to the webcast of BBC Radio Scotland quite a bit (mainly for the football commentaries). However, slightly off-topic, what's with the BBCs funding model? We pay about 100 pounds per household for a TV license, which funds BBC Radio and Televison. No complaints about that, we get some good telly programs, without any irritating commercials. But why is the license fee paying for the website (and satellite and digital telly channels)? Surely they should carry adverts on the website to at least partly defray the cost of the on-line content?
MediaXW is doing the trick for me. Adds the required mime-type handling, so clicking in your browser opens up media player and starts to play the stream.
it doesn't bode well for mass acceptance if it takes more than a miniscule amount of effort to make it work.
With this, it's no more effort than, say, Quicktime. Download the player/plugin - install it, the end.
Cheers,
Ian
Unlike with MP3, at the moment there is only one reference implementation of a Vorbis encoder. There are quite a few frontends, though. If you are in Windows, your best bet at the moment is to use the incredible but slightly clunky EAC, with the command line oggenc encoder available from the main site. The main alternative is CDex, but at the moment it only supports RC2 (not RC3). If you are in Linux, then you can use any ripping program you like as long as you use oggenc as the encoder.
What options to use?
You are using LAME --r3mix at the moment, so give '-q 5' a go (with RC3 on, specify a *quality* level rather than a *bitrate*). Quality 5 (out of 10) is nominally 160kpbs, and should be comparable or better than --r3mix in quality.
For more information and discussion, check out the Hydrogen Audio (Project Mayhem) forum. Many of the developers of various audio formats hang out there, as well as people organising listening tests.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
I encourage others to give the BBC positive comments, and encourage them to continue the testing, and beyond.
Send them to oggfeedback@bbc.co.uk
Here is what I sent:
Subject: Thank You! Keep it up!
Thank you for testing your streaming with ogg. Myself and hundreds of thousands of unix and unix-like operating system users around the world truly appreciate this.
It's often hard to have faith in large media companies. The BBC has always been the exception in my mind, and here it's shown again.
This is especially useful being in the USA, as it is very difficult to get your radio programming. I'll surely be listening using ogg frequently.
I hope the testing goes well, and ogg streaming becomes a future daily stream.
Good Day
Yes I know its not just unix / unix-like operating systems.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
I've installed FreeAmp twice now on Windows systems (I try to avoid them), but it's worked alright on both. It sometimes crashes, or just plain disappears, leaving a process hanging around, but for the most part it plays.
If you want a not-completely-free player, the plugin for WinAmp is also directly linked off that page.
The answer of course is probably obvious; technically superior technology doesn't guarantee success. VHS vs. Betamax. QWERTY vs. Dvorak. Windows vs. Macintosh. By the time VQF came on the scene, MP3 was firmly entrenched in internet culture. VQF never had a chance.
Here's an interesting, naive snippet from the VQF FAQ: While you can find thousands and thousands of MP3s out there, the number of VQFs is comparatively tiny. But this is only a matter of time. Once people begin to realize how incredible these are, their popularity will skyrocket. VQF.com says "Copyright 2000" at the bottom. They've had a year or two to skyrocket. Raise your hands; how many of you have even one VQF on your hard drive?
Now, listen to how familiar this sounds: Though not as popular as an MP3 file yet, Ogg Vorbis will eventually replace the MP3 format by popular demand, and like cassettes and 8 tracks, MP3's will be a thing of the past. This will happen because the Ogg Vorbis file format is a smaller file size, has a higher quality of sound clarity, and is FREE.
I'd like to believe in Ogg, but I've been burned one too many times.
Radio 4 also has a lot of varied content.
;-)
I think it is worth pointing out that they have some of the best origonal content in radio.
If you like comedy there is grounbreaking stuff there as well as old favourites.
Most of the best comedy coming out of the UK in the past 10-15 years has had it's roots in radio 4.
As for Radio 1 I would reccomend anyone into music checks out John Peel, one of the longest running DJ's in teh world an the man who has broken almost every major genre in the last 30 odd years.
There's pretty much music for everyone there, best to check out evenings and early mornings (GMT) as they put their more challenging programmes on, but tehy do have top class DJ's on these shows.
As for handling the load. The BBC is better placed than many to deal with it. I don't know teh stats these days but at one point they were the largest web presence in europe and second in the world only to M$
Anyway, good on Auntie Beeb, that's what I say
Working for the (other) man
The BBC is funded by every household in the UK that owns a TV paying approx 100UKP/year for a TV licence. This licence is required to watch *any* TV, or even to own one, I think. The money goes straight to the BBC. None of it goes to ITV, Channel 4, or any of the channels available on satelite, cable or digital terrestrial.
What do we get for our 100UKP? Well, on the upside, we get quality programming, that I am assured by a BBC advert, is the envy of the world. Not really. What we actually get is 2 channels of mediocre TV. Most of the shows I watch on BBC are American imports, and about two years late at that. 2 channels for 100UKP/year also seems kind of expensive, even for rip-off Britain, considering Sky (the satelite TV company), offers 30 or 40 channels IIRC for that money.
That's not all though. The money splays out sideways, to cover BBC radio, which covers 50% of the FM band, while commercial self-supporting AM stations such as Virgin have been unable to get FM space for 10 years.
We get BBC news 24. it's own progenitor described it as "the news service nobody wanted". It's not quite as good as CNN for news, or Bloomberg for business.
And we get the Perfect Day advert from a few years back. The BBC spent a huge wad of cash recording various artists singing one sentence each of Perfect Day, and then paid to have this played in Cinemas. An advert for a non-commercial service that you have to buy anyway. AMAZING!
Realistically, the BBC's time has come. 50 years ago, it was reasonable to stimulate growth in TV (and fitted in nicely with the more socialist Britain). Now, there are plenty of commercial services that do the same job better, and cheaper. Australia abolished its TV licence many years ago, and America never had one. I think it's about time we join the late-20th century and abolish ours.
Hmm, that came out longer than expected.
not_cub
q='echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"';s=\';b=\\;echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"
Well, since it's a test transmission to see if Ogg is popular, then slashdotting it sounds like a plan.
BTW, for those not familiar with the BBC radio staions, R4 is speech and R1 is pop music for young people. That sounds dreadfully patronising, doesn't it? Perhaps I should explain, they have R1 for young people and R2 for people who aren't young, so that ancient 30-year olds like me can listen to pop without our heads hurting. Of course, there's a certain amount of Jazz and Big Band music in the R2 Schedules as well, but that can be fun too.
It is a rite of passage in the UK when one grim day you wake up and don't like R1 anymore, and subsequently begin to mutter "dreadful noise, when I was a kid we had proper musicians like Duran Duran". Oh, except you can continue to listen to John Peel as long as you like.*
R3 is classical, R5 is rolling news and sport.
World Service is a mixture of new programming and "best of" to make one channel for world-wide broadcast. Consequentially it is a popular choice at home as well.
*I thought that CowCube session last week was excellent; why has this guy got a hotmail account instead of a record contract?
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
although i am a gpl enthousiast i am also a coompression enthousiast. In that respect realaudio and wma DEFINATELY outperform ogg in ultra low bandwidth circumstances for me (0-64kbps) in their latest incarnations. You cannot honestly say OGG blows them out of the water at those bitrates. A choice between quality and principle for me. What would you choose?
If you listen to the stream in XMMS, you can set option "Save to Disk" in the options for the Ogg Vorbis input plugin.
-- aL
The number of people complaining about Ogg having quality problems on Slashdot (without clips or objective blind testing) is inversely proportional to the number of people actually posting clips/blind test results to the Ogg Vorbis mailinglists.
We can't fix problems that don't exist.
--
GCP
I agree, it's a silly sounding name and probably raised the eyebrows of the boss of the BBC engineer that asked permission to stream it. Fortunately he had his boss well training, but I would certainly hesitate to recommend it to my boss for streaming. It sounds niche.
I've asked before and I'll ask again: why not call it "mp5" and encourage people to 'upgrade'? After all, Thompsons got away with MP3 Pro.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Multiply the radio number by 20 and that's the oldest age that you should be listening to that station.
Radio 1: up to 20 years old
Radio 2: up to 40 years old
Radio 3: up to 60 years old
Radio 4: up to 80 years old
Radio 5: Well, does anyone actually listen to radio 5?
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Thank you for the interest that the majority of you have shown in these trials. The feedback has been invaluable and supportive, with very little of it being just "real sux, ogg rulez!" etc but instead very clear, concise, technical and useful - keep it coming!
:)
:)
Please continue to bear with me as I test different settings or versions of ices/ogg libraries. The high bitrate streams are fine, but I'm trying to get the optimal quality for modem users at the moment. This may not be possible, but I've had a few suggestions which might work. This will mean, as I said in my post to the announce list, that streams may come and go as I try different setups - please be patient
Hopefully soon we will be able to offer these streams on a larger scale going through our content distribution network and available in pop-ups on the homepage, as opposed to the current setup (which seems to be coping remarkably well
Many thanks have to go to the BBC management for letting us continue with these trials - as a few people have noted, the language used on the ogg page suggest we're not management, but techies who have been given the opportunity to play with stuff we think is cool, and hopefully we can eventually persuade people higher up to take this really seriously - after all, it's in our interest as a public broadcaster to do so as we're making our services available to the highest number of users - plus of course, it's free software so we're not limited in what we can do with it.
Thanks! Let the trolling begin..
Hands up who has more than 1GB of mp3s? How about 5GB? 10GB? 20GB? 50GB?
.ogg format).
.ogg and once in .mp3. All for a little bit more quality? I can tell a 192Kbps from a CD, but damn - it's more than good enough to listen to on the whole.
.ogg taking off the way mp3 has. Nearly everyone has heard of mp3s, in the newspapers, on TV, they know what Napster is, they know how to create and share mp3s.
.ogg is worthwhile - you have just started building your collection of music files from your CD collection, don't have an mp3 player, and have lots of time on your hands. For the average person though, I'd be amazed if they ever hear of .ogg, let alone switch their whole collections over.
I'll bet a lot of you have huge collections of mp3s, and at the least a few gigabytes. Now just think about how long it'd take to rip all your cds again, download the downloaded tracks again (if you can even find them in
Think of the portable, car or hifi mp3 players you invested in that can't play the files, which will mean you'll need to keep every track on your hard drive twice, once in
I can't really see
The inertia behidn MP3 is too big to bring a total change in formats for most people for I'd say around 3-5 years. DVDs have been around for a while now, and STILL most people have a video player, huge amounts of videos are still sold and rented. Probably an unfair comparison - cheap DVD recorders aren't around - but you get the point.
Maybe for some
I think you underestimate the importance of a lack of adverts. The BBC show no adverts. The average American watches 44000 pieces of carefully crafted pieces of corporate propoganda every year, each 30 seconds long. These encourage them to eat more fast food, drive more, consume more, go into debt, and vote for the politicians who are most friendly to corporate interests (the candidate with the most corporate sponsorship can afford the most adverts).
If you watch US television for long, you will start to understand the obesity levels. Sandwitched between 10 minutes worth inane rubbish featuring potentially beautiful but dangerously starved people, you be subjected to 5 minutes of carefully crafted inviting you to go further into debt, then pig out on sugered drinks and ultra high fat junk.
Paying a paltry £100 a year to make a dent in the level of brainwashing we are subjected to is peanuts. The cost is justified by the decreased load on the NHS alone.
Of course, a better solution is to avoid TV altogether. If you must watch TV, at least buy a mirror to put up above the screen. That way you can look up from time to time and compare the excitement on the screen with the futile existence of the vegtable on the couch.
Why would anyone want to go outside, meet people or do things ? Instead, you can watch others have fake adventures or get your opinions and desires programmed in rather than going to all the trouble of figuring them out for yourself. You can achieve a state of lower consciousness - it helps pass the time while you wait for death.
For those too weak to avoid TV altogether (like me), advert free TV is the low-fat/filter-tipped option.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Please excuse the slight change of topic - there has been a bit of wierdness on /. about off-topicness recently so i am a little worried about posting this. However, it is still pertinent to the conversation.
;-). Which is a good thing, and seems to be sticking to the original remit of the bbc. They also seem to be doing a good job of raising the british profile abroad, which in an economic sense is a good thing.
;-)
if you're in the US and want 15% less state propaganda in your news.
This is an interesting comment about the British Broadcasting Corporation (a not for profit organisation funded by the british taxpayer). Its primary role is to provide non-biased News, Education and original entertainment to the british populace both home and abroad (through the fantastically cool world service). However, the bbc website throws this role wide open. Plenty of non-british (particularly ossies and usians) now use the website. And they use it for good reasons - its (relatively) non-biased, apoliticol and non-commercial nature. However, these people pay nothing towards the upkeep of the site, unlike british taxpayers like myself.
So, what is the role of the bbc website in a global market? Should they seek avenues for revenue from non-british peoples?
As this thread shows, they seem to be quite good at pushing new technologies and investing/experimenting with the internet (furthermore, news.bbc.co.uk is apache on linux, which is nice
But i cant help feeling a little bitter. Do any other rich countries have any non-commercial websites, up to the standard of the bbc? What I really, really want to do is get my revenge by leeching some taxpayers money back from America or Australia
Generally true, but as you mention, there is John Peel :-)
For anyone not familiar with UK radio, I'd advise anyone wanting to hear great, refreshing, different, non-mainstream music to watch out for John Peel's show.
Erm slash is stripping the link... Try again: Some interesting comments on the BBC and it's licensing model
Does anyone know of a streaming Ogg capable player for MacOS X? I've had trouble finding one in between trying to get Apple to realize they should include Ogg support in iTunes.
I have an Ogg plugin for QuickTime, but I just can't get streaming Ogg to work.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
And now... Radio 4 will explode.
BOOM
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Give Radio 1 a try if you've been annoyed at your US Top 40 station lately. However, the Brit DJs are just as dumb as the American ones. Guess that breed is the same the world over.
Was that out loud?
The BBC is funded by every household in the UK that owns a TV paying approx 100UKP/year for a TV licence. This licence is required to watch *any* TV, or even to own one, I think. The money goes straight to the BBC. None of it goes to ITV, Channel 4, or any of the channels available on satelite, cable or digital terrestrial.
Lets see. I moved to Canada from the UK. I pay Can$35 a month to watch telly through my cable provider - thats about UKP180/year. And what do I actually watch? Reruns of British shows mostly, plus the occassional gem like 'Nero Wolfe'. So for that extra 80quid I'm spending I get to watch LESS decent TV. The rest is bunk - there are only so many times I can watch the Buffy reruns (on six channels simultaneously...)
What do we get for our 100UKP? Well, on the upside, we get quality programming, that I am assured by a BBC advert, is the envy of the world.
Guess you haven't lived abroad then. The number of decent productions outside the A&E/BBC productions is pretty small
Not really. What we actually get is 2 channels of mediocre TV. Most of the shows I watch on BBC are American imports, and about two years late at that.
Well I pity you then...
2 channels for 100UKP/year also seems kind of expensive, even for rip-off Britain, considering Sky (the satelite TV company), offers 30 or 40 channels IIRC for that money.
Trust me - even 70+channels of rubbish is still rubbish.
That's not all though. The money splays out sideways, to cover BBC radio, which covers 50% of the FM band, while commercial self-supporting AM stations such as Virgin have been unable to get FM space for 10 years.
So you are complaining that that 100UKP also covers something like 6 national radio stations plus about 50+ local stations, all free of advertising...
We get BBC news 24. it's own progenitor described it as "the news service nobody wanted". It's not quite as good as CNN for news, or Bloomberg for business.
You prefer Chicken Noodle News? Did you find that last lobotomy was good value? CNN has lost the plot bigtime - it fails to find any depth or balance these days and replays the exploding World Trade Towers at the smallest excuse. There is no serious debate on CNN anymore - any kudos they got from having reporters inside Iraq during the Gulf war is long gone...
Now, there are plenty of commercial services that do the same job better, and cheaper. Australia abolished its TV licence many years ago, and America never had one. I think it's about time we join the late-20th century and abolish ours.
If the BBC disappeared, the quality of broadcasting in the UK would quickly look like it does elsewhere - lowest common denominator productions aimed at maximal viewers for minimal cost. Expect massively overrun reruns of cheap programming, budget chat shows, game shows and agro-shows filling up the airwaves. Radio 4 would cease to exist and nothing would replace it - for a commercial radio station relying on ads, there isn't the market. Any in-depth scientific programs would die a death - they are expensive to produce and research. Historical programs would also feel the breath of marketing and fade away.
To be honest, I'd be quite happy to pay UKP40-50/year to access premium web services on the BBC website. It seems you don't realise what value you are getting.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
All I can say is, thank the gods for the British taxpayers... commercial-free radio, whether talk or music, is awesome... that it's available as Ogg streams is simply icing on the cake.
So the next time anybody starts asking why we pay for a TV license, *that* is why... It pays for all that lovely ad-free radio.
Use the encoder that's in vorbistools, called oggenc. For a GUI front-end to a cdparanoia+oggenc combo, try grip.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
...they were prominent (along with commercial stations) in getting the FCC to back down on its plans for community radio. Their behavior is more similar to Sun's licensing of Java than the FSF's licensing of GNU; they want non-commercial radio to be available, but they want it to be NPR.
> In my opinion, National Public Radio (whose mission is to aid the
> growth and development of noncommercial radio) should definitely be
That indeed is the actual wording of the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act. But NPR, both in the late seventies and late nineties, worked vigorously against just that.
That said, they're pretty liberal on most other issues, and that would fit pretty well with the anticorporate overtones of free software.
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
But if I want to listen to Oggs on the way to work, I'm screwed.
If you care enough, fund development of an integer-based Vorbis decoder. Because many of the CPUs in portable MP3 players don't handle floating-point arithmetic very well, they use fixed-point math to decode MP3 audio. As soon as the reference Vorbis decoder uses fixed-point instead of floating-point math, the manufacturers will have a much easier time adding Ogg support.
Will I retire or break 10K?
We seem to have some differences of interpretation about the tone of my original post. I'll try to better explicate what I meant.
...and that would fit pretty well with the anticorporate overtones
>>
>> of free software.
>
> It's unfair of you to leave a plainly incorrect barb like that
> undefended.
It's not a barb, it's a compliment. I admire what I see as anticorporate aspects of free software, and appreciate the aspects of free software which slow complete corporate dominance over my computing experience.
> As a class of license, free software licenses have no
> anti-corporate overtones and the free software movement does not
> promote anti-corporate behavior or ethics.
Free software was created in response to a closed atmosphere regarding software distribution; that atmosphere was created by corporations to increase profits. (Once upon a time, the corporation was Xerox, the software was a printer driver, and the user being fucked over was RMS.) I also consider open scientific discourse to be anticorporate; democracy, too. Anything that dulls the Beast's claws helps give everyone else a chance to live.
Note as well the term "overtones;" I never said free software was axiomatically anticorporate. Corporations can play nicely, if forced to. But if IBM had half a chance to go back in time and close up the hardware specs for desktop machines, they'd do it in a second. This is inherent in the nature of power itself; freedom, of all kinds, is always the enemy of the powerful.
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man