why epg not updated when programs run late.from digitalspy.co.uk thread at
http://forum.digitalspy.co.uk/board/showthread.php?t=377210
I've recently complained to the BBC again about the EPGs not being kept accurate. This was when the Football on the Saturday before last caused eveything to run late, The SKY EPG wasn't altered and of course any recordings set were messed up!
However, the BBC has come back with the attached response which I think is pretty encouraging.
Lets hope that the FREEVIEW EPG will be sorted soon.
"There is an operational member of staff who sits in the programme playout
suite, from 6.30am to midnight, seven days a week, next to the playout
editor. In the case of live events overrunning, as soon as it is decided
how the schedule will be affected, we make the change - literally within
seconds.
Having made the change to our schedules, however, we are totally at the
mercy of the technological chain that leads to the viewers' boxes.
The schedule revisions are sent to the Sky platform, Freeview and the
listings pages of bbc.co.uk. The time it takes for a change to reach each
destination varies considerably and is dependant on many factors outside
our control.
As a general rule we would expect changes to get through to Freeview within
a few minutes. Sky takes slightly longer - up to around 15 minutes. The BBC
web pages are unfortunately the slowest to update, usually taking a couple
of hours.
For an update that we make to reach the viewer's box, whatever the
platform, several different computer systems must talk to each other, and
it is here regrettably that most problems occur.
I arranged to have the EPG unit's operational handover for Saturday 24th
June examined and it seems that they were experiencing slower than usual
updates to the Sky and Freeview platforms that night, which was reported to
the technical support provider.
The issue of recordings being affected is further complicated by the fact
that each platform uses the information that we send differently, even once
they have received it.
Sky boxes do use programme 'triggers' to start and stop recordings that
have been set in advance. With Freeview, however, only the BBC channels
currently support these triggers and so the vast majority of box
manufacturers have not implemented the triggering functionality. This means
that for Freeview viewers, even if they receive our schedule updates, the
recording start/stop time will not be changed.
The Freeview technology is in the process of being updated to support
programme triggers across all channels and the hope is that, by this
Christmas, new Freeview boxes will appear that use the trigger feed the BBC
sends."