91Èȱ¬

Thank you for posting this. Many interesting points.

I will not be quite as eloquent in my thoughts in response!

Time-shifted viewing
I must be unusual in watching about 90% timeshift. As iPlayer is so user friendly most of this is 91Èȱ¬ material. Your compression is not as bad as some of the other mainstream providers.

Our web based services are increasingly popular
I have already mentioned iPlayer so I will go onto web pages as provided by 91Èȱ¬ News and also address in that respect I believe that quality will always be important.

My main gripe here is the recent change to your audience's interaction via comments and blogs. There has been much written about this so rather than repeat I will give a link to my comment and there are others near it:

/blogs/theeditors/2011/05/our_next_step_in_news_blogging.html?postId=108713430

This may not appear at first site to be an R&D issue but the changes have been presented as cost cutting, easier management, better user experience etc. etc. depending on where the information has come from. I put my money on two issues that have probably really driven this change, one of which you have addressed. Firstly device diversity and this just shows the problem when trying to standardise an offering for mobiles, tablets and PCs. The second aspect is almost certainly advertising (outside the UK), space had to be made for advertising and the design had to make the user hit as many pages as possible to get information previously on a single page. Not an R&D problem but a commercial reality.

So in terms of the blog aspect of the internet I agree Perhaps we misunderstood the true significance of ‘user generated content’.

We must look to ourselves to define our role in relation to what we want to provide.
Not entirely. Yes you can see where technologies are heading and pull together thoughts on how to harness these things to your benefit. You must not forget that it is also about what we want you to provide. Sometimes the 91Èȱ¬ does come accross as Aunty knows best.

The next step in the chain is media management
We all know that the 91Èȱ¬ together with Siemens have been looking for the holy grail for a long time. I hope you are getting there! Obviously there will be a lot of work that cannot yet be in the public domain. There have been many false starts over the years. Creative Desktop & the DMI project come to mind. A success is and hopefully will be the start of the archiving project you mentioned.

mood detection for discovery
What is this? Sounds a bit Big Brother?

This creates some really interesting problems like how you synchronise material delivered over a broadcast network with the material delivered over the
internet.
A long running problem with simulcasts, not to mention the Greenwich time signal over internet and digital radio.
I read somewhere about putting a time stamp (I suppose it is timecode to a TV person) within material and letting receivers synchronise. I can see all sorts of problems with buffers and clock setting. Insurmountable?

You can't buy a better service from the 91Èȱ¬ no matter how wealthy you are
I am sure one cannot. I am sure there are other broadcasters (wishful thinking makes me think abroad) where the wealthy do buy a better service and feed it to their audience as propaganda. Is there any BS detector that R&D can come up with? The today programme could use it on their interviewees!

Is a sound recording available online.