I know some of you are interested in the net and the kind of things that it’s capable of - so just a heads up that I’ll be on Five Live tonight at some point between 11:30 and 12:30 talking about how the net is taking over the traditional publishing world - and how traditional publishers (like MCN) are being forced to keep up in a world that doesn’t understand…
m
Nice one!
Can you get a recording ?
I have a HD recording digibox thing… but I don’t think I can get the recordings off it onto my PC ?
Yes no problem - I’ll pull it off ROT tomorrow and post it up if you like.
m
I’d like to see that as well. I presume you mean “forced to keep up in a world that IT doesn’t understand…” ?
tonight I’m wearing my BBC tee-shirt but I’ll have to try and get a mention in somehow!
m
Good luck Matt!
thank you 
May I just add you have a great face for radio 
quite right too! I also have a stomach for radio… there’s a reason I do a lot of radio interviews and presented commercial radio, rather than TV… for a start when I started presenting there wern’t tha many widescreen TVs around.
Well that was short and sweet - the item got cut short so about all I managed to say was… funky and sexy.
m
I missed it Matt, any chance of having a link somehow so we can hear it.
And “Groovy”. Own up you really are Dr Evil 
lol!
Here’s the AOD link for the show last night
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/networks/fivelive/aod.shtml?fivelive/anita_thu
When I get back into the office I’ll pull the clip off Auto ROT and put it up.
I was on at about 11:50 - 12:00 in the end - it was cut quite short unfortunately.
m
Arghz!
The BBC site is an Apple hater… won’t detect my Realplayer plugin… can any of the BBC bods shed light on that, Realplayer… closed source proprietary codec… pain in the ass bloat-ware player… why not use open formats ?
sulky hambley
I might have to turn the windows pc on … you can’t imagine how much going near it hurts!
don’t start please! HATE it too… in fact very interesting debate about just this fact happening on
http://backstage.bbc.co.uk mailing list at the moment.
The Real plugin is your issue here not the BBC… (apart from using Real that is)… PC users get the same problem too - the browser just isn’t seeing the plugin - I normally recommend a reinstall of Real Player as sometimes the browser updates can kill off the plugin link… what you using?
m
Firefox 2x on OS X (latest) under an intel mac… I might try the RealAlternative thing i’ve heard good things about - It’s not a big deal for me, just annoying… like why can’t I listen to Radio1 in iTunes…
MY browser plugin issues are all my own… Flash doesnt work either 
The whole live streaming thing is a huge issue - it basically comes down to cost and how much money it costs to serve the content in that format, as well as others. When the BBC invested in it’s streaming servers Real Player was by far the best option - and now that investment has been made, turning it around is a slow and costly thing to achieve.
The BBC servers are capable of serving 750,000 simultaneous streams of any one stream at any given time - and it’s often running at capacity - that makes us one of the, if not the biggest streamers of AOD and live content on the globe. To change that capacity over to something else is… .well difficult.
I suspect FF 2 hasn’t picked up the Real Plugin - the RealAlternative is very good actually it’s what I use on my mac - I don’t let Real anywhere near my OS.
But on a good news front you wont have to deal with Real for very much longer… after all the complaints… the BBC is moving to Windows Media Player… yes you heard me right.
BUT I can say, that we in Research & Development are working on the next load of stuff which includes things like OGG streaming and the like.
m
Urgh…
I guess the maths says more people use windows, and it’d make things easier to use for the average bloke at his desk…
But OGG streams would be nice… just a thought, since you’re an R&D man, why can’t a 3rd party service offer a Real->X steam conversion type proxy thing, I realise the bandwidth costs would be astronomical, and there’s doubtless legal issues to take into account too, but seems like people would take it up ?
Thanks for the info so far Matt, I’ve always thought of the BBC as a bit “do it our way or do without” - since the early days of Real player being such a bad way to listen to music online! i guess it’s nothing new to most of teh tec hies on here, but Radio1’s lack of real streaming (no inverse-pun intended) drove me to www.last.fm - where I can listen to whatever I want, anytime! the only thing I miss is Moyles
lol well… if you’re interested in this kind of thing join the backstage mailing list
where you’ll be able to ask interesting questions like… where’s the MP3 stream of Radio 1? And of course when we have live streams of anything in any format we tell that list…
m
I saw this codec discussion elsewhere as well. I won’t install Real Player as it’s just pure turd, shame really. Can we get a transcode of this?
Annoyingly though I have to use IE7 to view bbc video content as WMP doesn’t work in Firefox in Vista because you can’t re-install WMP like you can on XP to register it with the browser. Silly state of affairs really, but then IE7 isn’t that bad on Vista.
