Jeremy Hunt’s mixed messages about PSB channels

One of my colleagues drew my attention earlier to a story about Jeremy Hunt in the Telegraph, titled “Provide local news or lose your TV guide slot, ITV and C4 told.” It was quite a striking headline, and he wondered if it was even possible for him to have such influence.

The article stated “Today Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary, will warn the major channels that their guide position is at risk if they don’t provide local news.” And when a newspaper says something like that, it usually means that they have been given a copy of the speech beforehand.

Is it possible?

Can a Minister do anything like this, even if he wants to? Well, actually yes. Electronic Programme Guides are covered by an Ofcom code, and that says that PSB (Public Service Broadcasting) channels have to be given prominence, and that the Secretary of State can add to or subtract from the list of PSB channels.

So, on the face of it, if ITV and C4 don’t pull their weight with local material (not that C4 has ever had any; it had a different job to do, catering for minorities) then they could find themselves losing their right to the top spots on the programme guide. Here, I could venture into an aside about how it was previous broadcasting reforms under first the Conservatives and then Labour that have stripped from ITV every shred of the regional programming it used to have, but that’s for another day.

Is it practical?

While on the face of it, it might be possible for Hunt to say to ITV and Channel 4 “You’re not doing what we want, down the EPG you go,” there are more problems than just the potential for Ministers to bully broadcasters into doing what they want.

PSB status is important not just for a place in the programme guide. On Freeview, it’s also intimately related to coverage, and Freeview is going to be the de-factor way of receiving television after switchover.

The PSB channels were given space, because they were PSBs. The BBC had two multiplexes (the chunks of capacity, each of which can carry several channels, also known as a mux), ITV and Channel 4 shared one, and the other three muxes are commercial (though Channel 5 has first dibs on half of one, and there are various other complications and tangled ownerships).

After switchover, there will be three PSB muxes; one will carry the BBC channels, one the HD services, and one the ITV and Channel 4 services with a slot for Channel 5. Channel 5 gets a space on that because many transmitters around the country will only be carrying those three muxes. The other three, with channels like Dave, E4, Sky Three, Sky Sports, ITV4, Film 4 and others won’t be on many relays, because the commercial operators don’t see the benefit.

That means that they’ll have less coverage, and people in rural areas won’t get all the channels (by percentage population, most people will get everything, nevertheless, some people are going to get fewer channels than others. Estimates are around 90% coverage for all channels, and 98% for just the PSB services, a difference of some 4.5million people.)

Now, it would be a bit odd, surely, to say to ITV “Well, you don’t have PSB status any more, so you can’t be on channel 3, but we’ll let you keep the space on that PSB mux” wouldn’t it? You can’t be a PSB sometimes, but not at others.

And what of the people who might gain PSB status by providing local news? Wouldn’t they be entitled to space on a mux that reaches everyone in their area, rather than just those on a main transmitter?

Effectively, to have any logic, the plan would have to involve swapping some of the channels on the ITV/C4 mux for others, otherwise regardless of channel numbers, you’d have the bizarre situation where local news wasn’t available to a lot of people, while there was universal coverage of channel that were no longer deemed PSB.

And there’s also another consequence of that. Given that most people think local TV will find it hard to survive, it’s going to be run on a shoestring – don’t expect glossy production values with amazing graphics. Don’t even expect something like Southern TV’s old Day By Day programme, most likely.

So, how do you think people (or voters as they’re sometimes called) would react if they suddenly found that, not only was Coronation Street or Desperate Housewives on a different channel number, but that if they lived in some rural areas, they couldn’t receive it any more? And the alternative was a distinctly budget local news operation?

I’m sure some people might welcome the news, but I suspect rather more would be pretty annoyed – and they might well think “Actually, couldn’t we just have Day By Day back, in its old slot?” That, surely, would be a better idea – something like the proposed independent news consortiums the last Government talked of, if ITV’s so determined to banish every memory of its regional past.

(There’s also talk of ‘ultra-local’ broadcasting, using extra frequencies; that would allow these new PSBs to get a slot in the cities, without bumping ITV or C4 services out of the way, but it would still be an odd arrangement, with non-PSBs getting better coverage, and local services very unlikely to be available in rural areas, where the cost of reaching those 4.5 million viewers could be prohibitive for a small organisation.)

What’s going on?

Later in the day, a story in Media Guardian caught my eye, “Traditional channels safe from being pushed down EPGs, says Jeremy Hunt,” which seems somewhat at odds with what was reported initially. The Guardian headline appears to be based on questions and answers afterwards, and they too point out it’s not quite what the speech implied.

So what happened? Did the Minister get a reality check from someone? Was the speech poorly drafted? Did someone point out that 4.5 million viewers in rural areas might translate into quite a lot of votes? And has Mr Hunt got quite as much of a grasp of his portfolio as those of us who are interested in broadcasting would like him to have?

Now, as some who read this site will know, I’m not a friend of the Conservative party, but even if I were, I think I might be tempted to ask whether or not whoever let the original idea be floated really had as much idea about the sheer impracticality of it as they should have, and the potential implications.

If any Minister wants to have the confidence of people in certain areas, they need to exhibit a decent grasp of the practicalities of what they propose. And so far – especially with now abandoned talk from last year of tearing up the BBC charter – I have to say I don’t have a lot of confidence in Jeremy Hunt. Some of that is undoubtedly down to my own political views, but really – if you’re going to float ideas, from whatever party, think about them first. Don’t put them in a speech and then row back from them in the Q&A immediately afterwards.

Toshiba TV firmware update for HDMI audio issues

Not hot news, but worth a mention as it’s recently been circulated as a bulletin to branches of a major retailer.

If you have a Toshiba TV and find that there are audio problems via HDMI – typically echo, or distortion – then you need to apply a fix. It was made available in April (hence not exactly hot news), but clearly not everyone has installed it. And you won’t notice it until you’ve been using HDMI for a while, so if you’re thinking of investing in a BD player or an HD receiver, it’s worth checking the version in your set’s menus. If the date is before April 2010, you should update.

Details of the affected sets, together with download links, are on the Toshiba support page.

My IFA highlight – Panasonic’s home fuel cell

Earlier this month, I was in Berlin for IFA, a huge show featuring all sorts of consumer electronics. Many of the different tech sites have covered products that were shown at it, some of which were pretty amazing. For example, LG had an OLED television set that was amazingly thin. I’ll upload a short video clip later, which shows it on a rotating stand. As it passes the camera, it really does seem to almost disappear – the set is well under a centimetre thick.

And there were new e-book readers from just about everyone, including some touch screen models from Sony, and plenty of tablets, from everyone who’s jumping on the iPad bandwagon, and of course lots of 3D TV.

Rather than enumerate all those gadgets, I’ll refer you to the coverage on sites like Pocket Lint and Register Hardware, where you can feast your eyes upon a wealth of lovely things.

Make your own energy

For me, the most interesting thing wasn’t any of those. It was something that was a bit tucked away, between a couple of halls, on a Panasonic stand with some solar cells, and a model of an energy efficient house of the future.

Panasonic's ENE-FARM domestic fuel cell - make your own electricity from the gas supply

This – thanks to my friend Mat Tuck for the photo – is Panasonic’s domestic fuel cell, called ENE-FARM. It’s already on sale in Japan, where you can buy one from your gas company.

What does it do? Well, feed it with natural gas, and the unit on the left splits it, extracting hydrogen, which is used to create electricity. The thermal energy (that’s heat) from the process is used to heat water, which is stored in the box on the right.

Panasonic reckons that a traditional power generation will result in only about 37% of the energy input being available at the home, by the time heat is lost during generation, and more energy in transmission. They claim, by contrast, that 85% of the energy input in the form of gas is used with the fuel cell – 35% goes to make electricity, and 50% to heat water.

As far as I can tell from the relevant Panasonic web pages (here and here), the electrical output of the fuel cell is only 1kW, which isn’t much, and most of us would be hard pushed to manage on that little power. But it could be a useful adjunct to a mains power supply – and if you lived in a remote rural area, perhaps one of these, fed by Calor gas deliveries, would be enough to get you by for at least some of the time.

Note that on the Panasonic sites it refers to ‘town gas’ – I’ve checked and they do run on natural gas; it’s just a slightly odd way of referring to the supply grid in Japan rather than harking back to the days of dirty old towns with their own gas works.

YouView – why can’t an existing receiver be updated?

With the announcement that Project Canvas is to be branded YouView, there have been quite a few discussions on various forums about the project – which has of course still to get final regulatory approval – and what it means for the consumer.

Specifically, some people have been questioning why we need a new box for YouView, and what does it bring that isn’t available already – and does it mean that some kit that has catch up TV functionality in it will become obsolete over night.

To deal with that last point first, Humax has specifically stated that they envisage two ranges of boxes going forward – the existing ones, which will have access to some of their own IPTV services, and the YouView/Canvas range, which will be built for the new platform. You will, in other words, have a choice – and I’m pretty certain other manufacturers will follow the same path. In one of my conversations with 3View about their PVR, they said that they envisage Freeview being seen as the of ‘entry level’ service, and YouView as the ‘premium’ version.

I’d say that it’s extremely unlikely that people will find existing services, like the iPlayer on Freesat, will disappear as a result of YouView. No broadcaster has suggested doing that, to my knowledge, and why would they? It would be silly to cut off iPlayer from the web, or Freesat, just because there are other boxes that can deliver it to the TV. And having developed apps for things iPlayer or ITVplayer on Freesat, there’s not really anything to be gained by switching those off. In all likelihood, they’ll be using the same streams anyway, and connecting to the same content database anyway.

So what does YouView bring to the table?

Why do we need YouView, some people say? If the MHEG engine (that’s the code that provides the interactive ‘red button’ services) in Freesat and FreeviewHD kit can provide access to IPTV, why is there a need for something else like YouView? Couldn’t it just all be done that way.

What Canvas/YouView brings, above and beyond the basic IPTV capability of platforms like Freesat, is a much richer environment in terms of UI and API, and that makes it much more flexible.

The MHEG interactive system in Freesat and Freeview HD boxes can access IPTV streams, but that’s about it in terms of rich functionality. It’s an add-on to a system that wasn’t originally designed to do this sort of job – a very clever one, mind, lest anyone thing I’m being too critical. But there are flaws. First, there’s not really the idea of persistent local storage, so that it can interact easily with a hard drive, or what’s on your home network. That makes some things tricky to do.

And in terms of ease of use, it’s something that sits on top of the device interface, by which I mean that it provides a different interface to the one for things like the programme guide on your TV or receiver. And if you’re watching a catch up of Doctor Who and then want to catch up on Taggart, you have to exit the BBC’s MHEG application, switch to an ITV channel, press the red button load their catch-up application (when it’s available), and start watching there.

That’s hardly a smooth and integrated experience, is it?

Delivering the apps

There would be another big drawback with using the MHEG system to deliver lots of IPTV content to. It’s designed to load an application from the broadcast datastream, which means as well as creating the app, you also have to have the capacity to broadcast it. That effectively limits access to the system to those people who can buy broadcast bandwidth in which to carry an albeit relatively small MHEG application, and get a channel slot on which to host it.

(It would, I suppose, be possible for a broadcaster to provide links from within their own app to other IPTV services – but then you’d have a single broadcaster as a gatekeeper for everything; that would be even more concentrated control than people are complaining about, especially if it were the BBC doing it).

If you consider that there are lots of companies that might want to offer their services via the IPTV functionality available in Freesat and Freeview HD, you can see how the EPG could very easily be cluttered up, as that’s really the only way to get a receiver to point at the right application.

Would it really be appealing and elegant if you had a whole section of the EPG with data channels for services like Picasa, YouTube, LoveFilm? There could be dozens of them, and it would quickly become tricky finding the right stuff.

Why would it have to be in the EPG? Because in the current specs, that’s the only place it could be; the interactivity and IPTV capabilities in current sets are there, but they are based very much around the MHEG engine, and separate from any other IP capabilities a set has (eg Vieracast, Internet@TV). You can’t build on those capabilities, because they’re all different and some sets don’t even have them (eg, Panasonic’s G10 series – capable now of iPlayer via Freesat, but with no other IPTV functionality outside that provided by the MHEG engine).

Why we need Canvas

YouView/Canvas is necessary if you want to provide a richer and better integrated system. It goes beyond the ‘add on layer’ approach offered by MHEG, and ties it into the whole system, providing a consistent UI – which is something that few sets around manage at the moment; for example, you can’t jump between online services and the broadcast EPG; you typically have to back all the way out of the IPTV services, and then go to live TV, then enter the programme guide.

Canvas unifies that, which should make it much easier for ‘ordinary’ people to find the stuff they want (who’s going to bet that ITVplayer won’t be “Red button, then page 7001” when it launches on Freesat?) in a consistent manner that just isn’t achievable on current sets (at least, not without rewriting the whole UI; and if you did that, can you imagine the confusion if people turned on their TV one day to find the whole EPG looked different?).

And, as well as doing that, by providing a consistent API and specifying core technologies (like the encryption), it will make it much easier for content providers to deploy their services. LoveFilm won’t have to do a different version for each brand of TV. Nor will AceTrax. Nor will they have to license different encryption systems because different TV makers have made different choices, and it’s the only way they can be on all of them.

And punters won’t have to think “Well, if I buy brand telly X I can get AceTrax, but if I buy brand Y I get LoveFilm, but no iPlayer”

For all these reasons – and many more – YouView will provide a lot more than the current IPTV offerings available from Freesat boxes; and it’s also because of the need to be able to provide all those things that you’re not going to simply be able to apply a firmware update to an existing box.

Of course, that doesn’t mean a FreeviewHD or Freesat box that you’ve bought this year will suddenly become obsolete. It will still work, it will still pick up the programmes you want to watch on it, and it’s very unlikely the online services that it accesses will go away.

But if you want to take advantage of all that YouView can offer, you really are going to have to get a box that has been designed from the outset with that in mind.

A well deserved win for BBC R&D

I’m intending to write a bit more about the BBC Research people in the near future, but I thought I’d just flag up a well deserved award that they received last week, at the annual IBC show in Amsterdam.

IBC is where you’ll find many of the latest developments in broadcasting, and it was two years ago in Amsterdam that I saw some of the first live demonstrations of the DVB-T2 technology that powers Freeview HD.

Amidst all the fuss about the surround sound issues on that service, some people claimed that the BBC don’t invent technology anymore, and just buy in things from elsewhere. That’s not really true. What is true is that the technological landscape of broadcasting has shifted dramatically from the days where the BBC labs could come up with great ideas like RDS or Nicam Stereo, more or less on their own.

In the modern world, international standards are required, and often the role of individual organisations in those doesn’t achieve as high a profile as when they can be said to have invented something themselves. But, nevertheless, the DVB-T2 technology that Freeview HD relies upon wouldn’t be there without the work of the BBC R&D department, who led the team, and provided much of the most important expertise.

They were recognised for that at IBC, with an award for the technology – you can read a little more about it on the BBC blog.

I think it’s important to remember things like this; all too often (and sometimes justly) other aspects of the corporation get criticised, and we forget that there’s an amazing amount of work, some of it so far behind the scenes that it’s easily forgotten, carried out by incredibly clever people in the BBC labs. Their website is worth a look. It’s a reminder of some of the great work that’s carried out on our behalf.

What begins with L-E-S-B ?

Nothing much, according to Google and their new instant search.

Instant search is a neat new addition to Google. Start typing and you’ll see results right away. As you type, results match what you’ve entered so far. So type the word ‘lettuce’ into Google.co.uk and after the ‘le’ you’ll see stuff about the city of Leeds. Add the ‘t’ and Google suggests ‘Letters to Juliet’ with alternatives you can click on that will give different results.

Type in ‘Gone Digital’ and I’m flattered to see that this blog comes near the top, and there’s even a suggestion ‘Gone Digital Blog.’ And all the while, as you type away, the results update on the fly.

Well, almost all the while. Now try slowly typing the word ‘lesbian.’ You’ll see all that stuff about Leeds, and then stuff about Les Miserable. And then when you get to the letter b, it all goes quiet. There are, it seems, no sites that match what you might be typing, and not even any words that Google might like to suggest you’re trying to find. Not the Greek island of Lesbos, or Lesbian.

If you want to search for any of those, you have to finish typing the word, and then press Enter. People have long talked of ‘lesbian invisibility’ (and not in a superhero sort of way), but this is a little extreme on Google’s part.

Gay men fare a bit better, in that Google does actually concede the existence of the word as a search term, but type that ‘y’ after ‘ga’ and once again, there are no results show, unless you click Enter.

This might seem resolutely trivial to some people, but it’s certainly interesting. Malcolm Coles blogged about this earlier – I’m just riding his coat tails – and the reason seems to be that there may be some things that are so unpleasant you don’t want people inadvertently seeing them in partial results. I can understand that.

But what I can’t understand is why, in the 21^st century, the top hits for the word ‘Gay’ should be hidden, nor why the word ‘Lesbian’ is likely to unsettle people so much that it can’t even be offered as a search suggestion.

Get your act together, Google!

Google may know the word Gay, but it won't show you any instant results

Leeds, then Les Mis, what begins with L-E-S-B ?

Nothing, according to Google. Lesbians and the isle of Lesbos aren't even words they want you to know you can search for

Do PVRs need to be defragmented?

A question I’ve seen pop up quite often over the years, both on the Toppy.org.uk forum that I run, and elsewhere, concerns disk fragmentation on PVRs. Does it matter, and how do you defragment the disk?

First, what is fragmentation? Borrowing an analogy from one of my colleagues, imagine the hard drive is a bus, and you have a load of schoolchildren, which make up the contents of a file. If the bus is empty, it’s easy for all the schoolchildren to get on the bus and sit together. And that makes it easy for a teacher to check they’re all there.

But what if the bus is already half full? Chances are that a few of the children will be able to sit together, but they’ll be spread out across the inside of the bus. And that means that if a teacher wants to check they’re all there, they have to do a fair bit of walking up and down.

That, essentially, is what happens when a computer’s hard disk becomes fragmented – the files that you save aren’t stored in one place, and instead are split into fragments. When you want to access them, the disk has to seek backwards and forwards, which is one of the slowest mechanical operations it can do, and so the file takes longer to fetch, or to save.

Fragmentation in PCs

In a PC, fragmentation can cause a massive slow-down. But it’s worth understanding why that happens, because it has a bearing on how this issue affects PVRs.

A Windows PC will typically have dozens, or hundreds of files open at the same time. You’re running lots of programs, each of which may be saving information or updating preferences, and the computer’s probably also using the hard disk as memory.

And, because very often files on a computer a quite small (by which I mean less than, say, 100 kilobytes), then the file system on a PC – that’s the way the hard drive is laid out – is designed to take account of that, and allows small pieces of space to be allocated. After all, you don’t want to lose 1MB of disk space when you save a small Word document or photo, just because that’s the smallest part that can be set aside in one go.

The downside of that is that while small files don’t take up too much empty space, large ones end up being made of many, many different pieces. As you create and delete files, you end up with lots of small gaps, and eventually files get slotted into some of those gaps. Fragmentation can become quite bad on some systems, and have a major effect upon performance.

What’s different in a PVR?

The story is rather different in a PVR, however. First, they’re not a general purpose computer, so they will typically be doing far fewer things than a PC. Being designed for a specific purpose, they can be tailored to perform well at that task.

The primary thing that’s being done with a PVR is recording and playing television. And that means big files – even a poor quality standard definition channel will use up around 900MB of disk space per hour, or 15MB per minute.

And since that’s all that users are storing on the hard drive, you can choose a way of setting up the file system that takes it into account. Instead of having to allocate disk space in small chunks, you can do it in much bigger ones. That means that even if there is fragmentation, a file will typically be split across far fewer chunks than on a PC.

With most PVRs, you’ll never be recording more than two files at a time, and possibly playing one back as well. That’s a far cry from a PC or Mac – as I write this, I have seven applications running on my Mac, and the ‘lsof’ command tells me there are 1,635 files open.

So, while a desktop computer’s hard drive may be frantically dashing backwards and forwards keeping track of all those files, the one in a PVR has a much more leisurely job.

And, as all the files are so large, when you do delete a recording, the gap it leaves will be large too – you won’t end up with lots of small pockets of space left all over the hard drive.

Different PVRs have different file systems; some do allow smaller files, like the Topfield. Some Humax models have a separate partition for those smaller JPG and MP3 files. And of course many PVRs are designed so that the operating system runs from the memory, and doesn’t have to use the hard disk for anything other than storing recordings.

Does it matter?

Now, I’m not saying that PVRs don’t become fragmented, but that it happens to a much lesser degree than with a general purpose computer. And on the whole, I don’t think it really makes a massive difference. Because of the limitations on what you’re able to do with a PVR – record two, watch one – then even when a disk is fragmented, the disk really isn’t that exercised.

Take a look at the figures I worked out for HD recordings on Freeview a couple of weeks ago. If you take the highest figure, 4GB per hour, and assume you managed to be recording two channels at that rate, while watching a recording at the same rate, that would be 12GB an hour the PVR would need to shift to and from the hard disk, or about 200MB per minute. That’s somewhere around a maximum rate of 3.5MB per second.

That’s a small fraction of the theoretical rate of many modern disks; the Western Digital units designed for AV purposes, for instance, claim rates of up to 111MB/second. Even allowing for marketing spin, and the effect of serious fragmentation, it’s easy to see that sustaining a transfer rate of 3.5MB per second really isn’t difficult for a drive at all.

So, in short, while they can become fragmented, the disks in PVRs do so to a much lesser degree than those in general purpose computers. And even the demands of HD recording and playback aren’t high enough to make it worth including a defragmentation tool in the PVR’s firmware.