[Muf]

Winter Olympics on HD2. Live for Russia and possibly other countries, reruns elsewhere, also possibility of FIFA 2006 live.
http://www.euro1080.tv/pdf/Newsletter1.pdf

Jim.

[Abstrakt]

Thanks for the heads up Jim!

And to those new to Euro1080: remember to take their announcements with a large grain of salt. They had already promised us delayed broadcasts of the Athens Olympics which never materialized. Only months later did they admit that those negotiations had fallen through...

[Stephen Neal]

HD2 is used to allow regional restriction isn't it? I guess the question is whether the BBC will grant Euro1080 HD rights for the UK (and thus UK registered Euro1080 cards), given that they are the UK rights holders.

ISTR that the New Year's concert from Vienna was blocked to German viewers on HD-2 for this reason.

[Muf]

Yes Stephen that is the purpose of HD2. I can only imagine the amount of organising and negotiating going on behind the scenes. I think they also have a facility in place to charge the householder for an event and then pass the funds on to the rights holder although we haven't seen this in action yet.
Abstrakt, You are right, we can never be sure until we are actually looking at an event.

Jim.

[Stephen Neal]

Originally Posted by Muf

Yes Stephen that is the purpose of HD2. I can only imagine the amount of organising and negotiating going on behind the scenes. I think they also have a facility in place to charge the householder for an event and then pass the funds on to the rights holder although we haven't seen this in action yet.
Abstrakt, You are right, we can never be sure until we are actually looking at an event.

Jim.

Yep - I guess the argument for PSBs, who wouldn't accept payment, is whether the(ir) public service interest is greater served by the value added by their production (in SD), via HD delivery of a pool-feed (with no domestic production, possibly not even local commentary) - with a quality of presentation production (not coverage production) lower than that delivered by something like BBCi multi-screen, or the choice.

Given the amount of resources many PSBs pump into domestic production (domestic interviews, extra camera angles, replays, background production, enhanced analysis etc.) - I can imagine a number opting out of HD2 carriage in their regions - though those who do little to the host broadcast feed, and add little local value, may feel differently.

[Muf]

Update.
Ireland got listed for HD2 live coverage of the Winter Olympics so I get to see the events. The National Broadcaster here is not covering the event live.

Jim

[RecordablDVDfan]

Is this FTA and mpeg2 ?

[Muf]

MPEG2 yes but not FTA.
Available to Euro1080 customers through HD2 in the following countries:
Belgium, Sweden, Luxembourg, Ireland, Ukraine and Russia.

Jim.

[Stephen Neal]

Originally Posted by RecordablDVDfan

Is this FTA and mpeg2 ?

MPEG2 - but you need to have purchased a Euro 1080 viewing card. This provides continuous access to the HD1 channel (which will carry repeats of the Winter Olympics in March, once the event is over), and potential access to HD2.

HD2 is the channel Euro1080 created so that they didn't have to break the contract for their original Euro1080 channel (which became HD1) - which is guaranteed to be available to all viewers who bought a card.

However many sporting events have different rights holders in each European country - and some will, understandably, not allow another platform to broadcast within their region if they have paid a lot of money for the rights. For this reason, HD2 costs Euro1080 subscribers nothing extra, but it is regionally restricted on an event-by-event basis - the regional restriction being a function of your registered viewing address. (A bit like Sky and the BBC One / RTE1 issue) The other option would have been not showing the events at all to any viewers - as they wouldn't be broadcastable to any Euro1080 subscribers via HD1 because most decent events already have rights holders in many territories in the Euro1080 footprint, and Euro1080 would have had to have rights waivers from every rights holder in every territory...

For the Winter Olympics, I suspect most European rights holders, like the BBC, who have invested a lot of money in location production and rights, will not release broadcast rights in their countries - hence the limited number of countries the Winters are available in via HD2.

[RecordablDVDfan]

Anyone able to record the stream in some way ? Just watching the snowboarding which looks very good in SD, in HD it must look awesome !!

RecordablDVDfan wrote:

Just watching the snowboarding which looks very good in SD, in HD it must look awesome !!

Agreed

[Stephen Neal]

Worth pointing out that not all the Olympic events are being covered in HD.

Some are 16:9 SD for practical reasons (some of the skiing requires cable runs that had to be laid in the summer, and I believe only SD triax was feasible for this)

Other events - like the opening - were a mix of 16:9 HD cabled cameras, and 16:9 SD wireless cameras.

That said - even in SD the HD cameras are looking very clean. Be interesting to see what it looks like in HD - either via HD1 in March, or at a BBC demo (if they do one)

[Muf]

Snowboarding was not on the list of events being covered, here is the list: ski jumping, ice hockey, speed skating, freestyle skiing, figure skating and the opening and closing ceremony.
Stephen, the opening ceremony looked great except for the SD camera shots which were instantly recognisable, they kept these to a minimum thankfully. None of what I have seen so far has had a commentary track, you just hear the stadium speakers, which is adequate and forgivable since the picture is so good. Speed skating showing at the moment.

Jim.

[Hellicopter]

According to the French HD forum,Japanese feed is still up on 5W.
Not able to check at present as away from house.

Atlantic Bird 3 (5°W)
- Feed: Torino 2006 Winter Olympics HD est de retour (has returned)sur 11055.00 MHz, pol.V SR:27488 FEC:3/4 SID:1 PID:17/20, après une période d´arrêt de ses émissions (Clair). HD 4:2:2 Feed for NHK

Posted today 1439 GMT

Alan

[sprattgraham]

Originally Posted by Hellicopter

According to the French HD forum,Japanese feed is still up on 5W.
Not able to check at present as away from house.

Atlantic Bird 3 (5°W)
- Feed: Torino 2006 Winter Olympics HD est de retour (has returned)sur 11055.00 MHz, pol.V SR:27488 FEC:3/4 SID:1 PID:17/20, après une période d´arrêt de ses émissions (Clair). HD 4:2:2 Feed for NHK

Posted today 1439 GMT

Alan

If my PC was working I would have a look.

[bayards]

Caught it on my new Quali-tv box - set up this morning. 5W is just at the extreme edge of my dish before it bangs into the chimney.

Saw some recorded crowd scenes with emphasis on Japanese participants walking around. Close-ups of story boards (in Japanese) which then went to colour bars.

Clean feed although there is a green flashing band at bottom of screen. No channel ident though.

Howard

[Muf]

That's PC's for you Graham, you need two, one as standby. I just had a look at that feed on 5 West. There is no audio track so I can't view it live with MyTheatre. There seems to be no encryption so I recorded the TS stream and played it back in the Elecard player. The playback is unintelligible, all blocky. The bit rate is 36.7 Mbps so perhaps too fast for my system (P4 3.4GHz) or the player software. This is my first experience of these high bit rate feeds although I think people have managed to play them on PC's before.

Jim.

[RecordablDVDfan]

Yep it's still active showing shot of Ski slope, ah just gone to colour bars as I type this...

[Muf]

I reported earlier on this thread that there was no commentary track on the HD2 transmissions but the ski jumping event just completed now did have a commentary track, very professional.

Jim.