BBC Persian

Wasn't there a mention earlier of a small pot of money being set aside to provide these services in the UK from the next funding round or something like that?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/vietnamese/images/1024/brand.jpg

BBC Vietnamese have updated their website, incorporating the LN branding.

BBC Vietnamese Home Page

Press release from BBC Press Office: Click here

Example of embedded video: Click here

Is it not possible to change the language on their embedded video controls? 'Share', 'Link to this' and 'Pop-out' aren't going to make much sense to many visiting the foreign language sites, especially languages with different scripts. Or is it not technically possible to change things on the same player?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2009/apr/06/bbc-world-service-television

Looks like the TV services will be kept to Arabic and Persian for now.

And on a slightly unrelated note BBC World News continues to lose money, likely to be operating at a loss of £2 million, its best performance yet!

As the comments in the Guardian article suggest, it has mixed up the BBC channel brands and services. Although BBC World News was once called BBC World Service Television it has never been run or funded by the World Service, and so its profits or loses do not affect World Service.

There never was any funding set aside for South Asia or African TV as part of the last FCO settlement, so I don't understand why these services were announced (if they ever officially were). This article confirms there is currently no funding for them.

The next settlement begins in April 2011. What happens between now and then is anyone's guess.

Is the full version of these titles available anywhere?

Vietnamese don't produce long form programmes so don't have a need for a long title sequence. If it does exist, it won't be out in the wild yet. The longer Turkish sequence is mainly shots of London, so I'd guess it looks the same.

The localisation for the Embedded Media Player (EMP) is slowly progressing. The playlist does already contain the correct code to invoke the Vietnamese user experience, so when the EMP team complete the work all of the exisitng published players will immediately be localised.

An interesting part of this story was their discussion of how BBC Persian has been covering the Iran elections.. it kicks in at about 14 minutes. It's actually kind of interesting to see some of their output translated into English.