All posts by Tony Hill
Below are all of Tony Hill's postings, with the most recent are at the bottom of the page.We use subtitles a lot - certainly for all drama and all American programmes. However, we have found that only BBC subtitles are reliable and the others, especially ITV, are useless. Why such a difference?
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MikeP: The voice recognition subtitles are useless and I never use them. The ITV "normal" subtitles are OK when they appear but that usually isn't for more than about 3 or 4 minutes at a time - they just keep disappearing. They, ITV, should do something about it but I suspect they don't really care.
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I will certainly miss the Teletext aspect of the Red Button. I check racing results and stockmarket/currencies data every night and this is done as a "communal exercise" - with my wife and I looking at the info at the same time. As I bet on horses (not large amounts) I don't look at the results until the evening when there is joint excitement (not huge but enjoyable) as we look at the results. This is not possible with the unfriendly "loner" use of a tablet or laptop.I could think of much better ways for the BBC to save money.As for watching LIVE programming via iPlayer on a computer, etc this is, as everybody has said, a complete nonsense and a con for all proper licence-payers, and should be stopped immediately.
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I am an ardent recorder of data (!) and, amongst other things, I have been recording our TV viewing by channel. If of interest, in the BBC debate, our viewing (live plus time-shifted) by channel families (ie ITV, ITV2, ITV3, ITV4 count as "ITV") averaged over the period (Jan 2011 to date in 2015) is:
BBC 65% -- ITV 13% --Ch4 13% -- Five 6% -- Other (S4C for Welsh football, Lifestyle channel, etc) 3%
with BBC2 = 27% and BBC4 = 16%.
So, Licence Fee looks good to me!
PS: We are not Sky subscribers, as you can deduce - and watch mainly on Freesat
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I see that subtitles are now available on BBC iPlayer - on our Smart TV (LG). Excellent as before this iPlayer was not hugely useful to me.
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R Murchie: We also have the same problems in the outer reaches of Rowridge coverage in Dorset - BBC4 HD present sometimes and then not. Fortunately we only use Freeview as a reserve with the great majority of our viewing by satellite using either a Manhattan HD Freesat box or our Technomate HD generic receiver fed from a second motorised dish. Also, interestingly and not really anticipated by me, our broadband streaming activity is steadily increasing.
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As I responded earlier, my problems with Com7 (BBC4 HD) still exist - sometimes OK then disappears. Mostly retuning works but sometimes not. We are on the western edge of Rowridge coverage area and need boosters for everything. Is this all down to the low power of Com7?
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My recommendation for all the Com7/BBC4 HD problems is to use Freesat - as I mainly do.
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BBC4 etc all disappeared again yesterday (20th Aug) - channels received varies daily between 114 and 179. Great! Lucky we mainly use Freesat!
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Friday 22 May 2015 10:55AM
Dorchester
To: Bill Kay and MikeP
Unfortunately, I am over 75 - just thought "OAP" was a snappier (if not quite correct) post!