Film4 +1
Another chance to watch the best of British film-making, US independents, Hollywood blockbusters, guilty pleasures, foreign films and cult cinema. Great films you know, great films you don't.Main TV standard-definiton channels
How to Watch: Film4 +1
Main TV standard-definiton channels
| Channel name arrow_drop_down | web | radio | Freeview | Sky | Freesat | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| — Film4 +1 | 47 (90%) | 314 | 301 |
Regional content: National channel with no regional content or variations.
media.info: For full details of broadcaster contacts, see the
media.info Film4 +1 page.Official site: See the
Film4 +1 website.From Wikipedia: edit Programming Film4 did not originally focus on broadcasting blockbusters, but nowadays broadcasts many mainstream Hollywood movies. The channel frequently has themed nights or seasons in which a number of films centred around one genre, director or actor are shown. As Channel 4 also owns a film production company, Film4 Productions, it shows many of its in-house productions. - en.wikipedia.org
read more about Film4 +1 on wikipedia (summary by Clipped).Freeview multiplex: Film4 +1 is on multiplex COM5 in
.Monday, 9 December 2019
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StevensOnln110:21 AM
js & Chris.SE: All iPlayer streams are personal streams (i.e. a separate stream of data packets are sent from the BBC's content delivery network (CDN) for each viewer). It doesn't support multicast (where a single stream of data packets are sent from a server and are then duplicated by each router they pass through, on the public internet and through the ISP's networks until the reach the viewer's home router, so that each viewer who has requested the stream gets a copy of exactly the same data packets.
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Chris.SE6:55 PM
StevensOnln1:
Ah great, thanks for that clarification. And I suppose I should have guessed as much bearing in mind one has to login with one's BBC account! I shall clearly have to spend some time at a future point, mugging up on all this.
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js8:44 PM
StevensOnln1: Well, if that's the case, it's incredibly inefficient, costly, and ultimately, unworkable.
With their moans and groans about how few billions we pay them to provide television, how can it be justified?
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StevensOnln111:03 PM
js: iPlayer is far from unworkable, it has worked extremely well for over 10 years! It sounds like you have little knowledge of how iPlayer and other streaming/catchup services (and the content delivery networks that enable huge numbers of viewers to watch simultaneously) work. It's set to get even better with the BBC's proposal to make most programs available on demand for 12 months after broadcast. Around half of my viewing is from recordings made on the Freesat box in the living room, however the convenience of being able to watch any program on any TV (or other device) at a time of my choosing can't be beaten.
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js11:37 PM
StevensOnln1: Well, perhaps you can enlighten us on how it's technically possible to deliver millions of individual streams - which is the question I asked in the first place.
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Tuesday, 10 December 2019
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Chris.SE2:52 AM
js: In my brief search yesterday I came across rss Whilst that blog is specific to the trials and delivery of UHD, it does explain how iPlayer delivery is done. If you stop and think about it, every bit of internet "browsing" is an individual stream, so this is nothing unusual. The clever bit is the way the streaming is done with these CDNs.
I have to agree with StevensOnln1 about the convenience of being able to watch a/any programme at a time of one's choosing. Over the last three or four years, I've probably used all of the well known streaming or catchup services at one time or another - in some instances only making use of a free trial period, and that's only really become possible since we've had a decent Internet connection (FTTC). Bog standard ADSL is not especially conducive to these things (never mind the usage limitations at the time!) although we did use it from time to time.
Whilst I'm not especially happy about what seems to be a "push" towards "normal" viewing using streaming services, (I will always strongly argue for mainstream terrestrial services), I am all for such things being available to give a means of greater choice / options of what to view and when. These days I find too many programmes that I would like to watch being scheduled at the same time - the so called "competition" between the broadcasters - which IMHO doesn't actually benefit the majority of viewers as a lot of people will actually miss some of the programmes never being able to watch on catch up for one reason or another.
I also believe that if it weren't for the iPlayer development over the last decade, our broadband connections would not have improved as much as they have in the last few years. Investment by BT (and others) had been somewhat "tardy" in the past, and it's only because of demand for better services to cope with things such as streaming (& gaming), never mind the business need, that the investment has actually been made.
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js4:20 AM
Chris.SE: Thanks, I'll take a look later with a VPN and Tor: If you sup with the Devil use a long spoon.
Meanwhile:
Unicast
In computer networking, unicast refers to a one-to-one transmission from one point in the network to another point; that is, one sender and one receiver, each identified by a network address. More at "Wikipedia"
Multicast:
In computer networking, multicast is group communication where data transmission is addressed to a group of destination computers simultaneously. Multicast can be one-to-many or many-to-many distribution ... More at "Wikipedia"
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Wednesday, 11 December 2019
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js3:50 AM
Chris.SE: Thanks again. So, given that an iplayer stream is 5Mbps, we have 5Gbps per 1000 and 5Tbps per million - the engines won't stand it captain! Well, maybe a million, but 20 million?
Searching for "BBC multicast" brought me to an interesting page:
"Multicast streaming
By combining multicast distribution to edge caches with unicast distribution downstream we are also able to support the large installed base of standards-based unicast media players. And using this hybrid model we can even support product features such as "live restart" in a scalable manner."
Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over IP Multicast - BBC R&D
Presumably "live restart" is what we've been discussing. I'm not sure what "in a scalable manner" means.
An early BBC attempt at using Multicast "a smarter way of serving large numbers of people" is here:
Multicast | Radio
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StevensOnln110:34 AM
js: Most viewers aren't watching via 4G/5G, although there are standards for 4G and 5G multicast which would dramatically reduce the load on the mobile networks for live streaming, if implemented. Multicast is however used very successfully by BT and TalkTalk for delivery of their subscription channels to YouView boxes.
The BBC's current approach with iPlayer (various major streaming services use a similar approach) is to have content streamed from servers on each ISP's network, so that most iPlayer streams only have to be delivered from a point within the ISP's network and not across the public internet. The BBC don't need as much central server and network bandwidth capacity to cope during periods of heavy demand, such as during coverage of major live music and sporting events. Multicast would be an even better way of doing it, but requires that every router in both the ISP's network and the viewer's home network have multicast support enabled, as well as the client end device (i.e. TV, smart box, PC/laptop, tablet, phone, etc) have multicast support enabled too. In short, multicast is much more complicated to get working and is only currently used in situations where the ISP has supplied all of the equipment in the delivery chain.
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