I suppose what it did also do, eventually, was allow people to develop a ground based mobile midpoint system, which could be used if a helicopter couldn't be used. I believe in the London Marathon, it was low cloud cover, as opposed to fog, but whatever, to let people understand, the midpoint helicopter has to fly at a low height, and the cloud cover was so low, the helicopter would have had to have flown above the cloud, thus breaking the uplink.
Cloud won't break a radio link. The bigger issue is likely to be that the helicopters in London have to fly in VFR conditions - i.e. they can't go into the cloud. And they're limited to the altitudes they can fly without getting in the way of Heathrow / City Airport.
Midpoint planes are becoming more popular, as they fly high enough not to get in the way, have a longer time on the job, and don't have as many flight restrictions. They are however much more expensive and more specialised. We can convert a helicopter to mid point duty in about 6 hours. To rig the aircraft (if you can get a suitable one) is much longer.
Have a read of the report into the helicopter crash into the tower in Vauxhall for a detailed look at the constraints on helicopter usage in London. And the pilot there was an experienced aerial camera pilot too, I worked with him in Athens.
Snooker coverage just fell off air to a blank screen a few minutes ago. Was expecting the apology caption to make an appearance.
Considering the amount of resiliency on site today (I'm doing an event on the other side of the road, I can see the OB compound out the window), that's quite impressive to fall off air.
I guess if somebody is trying to manually pan a dish to point at the chopper there is a disadvantage if it can't be seen.
I assume that with this kind of event the size of the crowds meant getting a reliable mobile signal was difficult, so the bonded 3G solutions were not viable.
Women's race from Le Tour de Yorkshire wasn't broadcast today due to technical issues with the relay plane.
Also, the graphics look like the Tour De France ones. With French text etc. What's that about? Do vsquared do it as a world feed?
If they are the TdF graphics, then that is the France Televisions Sport graphics house style, which would indicate that tv coverage has been contracted out to France Televisions who are producing for the race organizers.
That's the thing, it was done by VSquared/Timeline_tv. Or was that just the studio show for ITV
Women's race from Le Tour de Yorkshire wasn't broadcast today due to technical issues with the relay plane.
Also, the graphics look like the Tour De France ones. With French text etc. What's that about? Do vsquared do it as a world feed?
If they are the TdF graphics, then that is the France Televisions Sport graphics house style, which would indicate that tv coverage has been contracted out to France Televisions who are producing for the race organizers.
That's the thing, it was done by VSquared/Timeline_tv. Or was that just the studio show for ITV
That's the production company for ITV, the actual feed is produced by the French company mentioned.
I expect Timeline are providing the ITV presentation coverage resources, but not the overall tour coverage. I'd be mildly surprised if the host feed wasn't resourced by the French resource provider who do other Tours (and are used to working with the host production) as it's not tricky to get trucks from France to the UK.
Sounds like there was an issue with the mid-point plane which will have meant for most of the race no mobile cameras. (Bonded 3G/4G coverage is really likely to be a non-starter for live sport production camera links - it's low bitrate and high latency and if you have more than one camera in the same area they will be fighting each other for possibly scarce bandwidth)
Bonded 3G/4G coverage is really likely to be a non-starter for live sport production camera links - it's low bitrate and high latency and if you have more than one camera in the same area they will be fighting each other for possibly scarce bandwidth
Indeed - it works for news (most of the time) but as noggin says, for various reasons its not suitable for sport. Infact, even for radio you can at times struggle to get 48kbps through with low enough latency for a two way conversation - and that's using diversity (rather than bonding) across all four mobile networks. LTE has helped a lot but there are certain places / situations where you know you're going to struggle (and a few where you think you'll be fine but aren't). To be fair you can be surprised the other way and it'll work well where you'd expect it to struggle.
Bonded 3G/4G coverage is really likely to be a non-starter for live sport production camera links - it's low bitrate and high latency and if you have more than one camera in the same area they will be fighting each other for possibly scarce bandwidth
Indeed - it works for news (most of the time) but as noggin says, for various reasons its not suitable for sport. Infact, even for radio you can at times struggle to get 48kbps through with low enough latency for a two way conversation - and that's using diversity (rather than bonding) across all four mobile networks. LTE has helped a lot but there are certain places / situations where you know you're going to struggle (and a few where you think you'll be fine but aren't). To be fair you can be surprised the other way and it'll work well where you'd expect it to struggle.
Yes - and you can often mitigate with WiFi if you're in a fixed location.
Meanwhile, on Sky Sports, new Cricket graphics for the new season.
Still got the glass backed bevelled bottom of the screen score bar, but now, there's a lot of lower case lettering and everything is now in the Sky Sports house font
Double blue replay wipes as well. No longer does a graphic fly out from the centre of the screen at you. Just a simple centre to left/right screen blue rectangular wipe.
