I’m a customer of ntl, now the UKs only cable supplier. I take the whole package – tv, broadband, phone. When I had an extremely average customer service experience recently, from a company who’s bad service is legendary, I was wandering around the internet looking for similar experiences. I found this – the best customer hate mail I’ve seen – enjoy.
When I started this site early in 2002 I paid around £80 per year for 50Mb of space. Later it was slightly grudgingly upped to 100Mb by my then host who later refused any more free upgrades. The current webhost for this site – IX Webhosting of Hopkinsville, Kentucky has just upped the space available to me to 5Gb with two domains 4 databases and unlimited emails accounts. Cost $80 a year. I’m not sure what to do with all the space…
Aug 2005
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Here’s something as off topic as the rest of this page, but for once it’s someone else’s material. An excellent essay on how it was... by Roger Bunce
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NTL just increased my connection speed again – from 750 to 2Mb/s without increasing the price – which brings one step closer the moment when it all switches round and television is just part of the great mass of information this machine can access. Come to think of it, it can already via the Hauppauge (Hop-hog, apparently) card, but that’s cheating.
So far, since I moved from dial-up, I paid £25 per month in December 2003 for 512Kb/s, which went up to 600 then 768 now 2Mb/s. I think there may be quite a lot of space to increase some more down the fibre optic.
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Are we all familiar with Divx? – an MPEG4 compatible codec which allows compression ten times as great as digital tv’s MPEG2. It means that a whole DVD’s worth of material can go on a CD. When they convert digital tv to the more modern standard (when…), it means you can have ten times the number of channels. There’s something to look forward to.
August 2004
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Broadcast Quality
In the mid eighties sometime the Presentation studio at BBC TV Centre – see it below – was given a new-fangled CCD camera to try out – a small box with a lens on one end and a cable at the other. They were just on the market, and the engineers were thinking of using it for our new in-vision kids presentation starring our discovery Phillip Schofield.
The engineers connected it to the mixer as camera 4 so we could see how it looked. One afternoon I needed to pre-record a lit candle for some reason I don’t remember, and as well as one of the Link studio cameras we pointed the CCD camera at it. The picture from the CCD was amazing – a quality we hadn’t seen before – and I decided to use that instead of the Link tube camera output.
A while after the session was over, one of the camera crew came back to the studio to tell me that I couldn’t use the material I’d recorded because it wasn’t broadcast quality. Apparently someone somewhere – maybe in the union – had declared all CCD cameras to be below spec. As a now senior member of BBC Promotions I did feel a certain desire to make a strong retort (would he have said the same thing to Stewart Morris or Jim Atkinson – I think not) coming over me, but being a nice chap, and ex-cameraman, I thanked him for his input, got on with the job and used the material.
Later, I wondered if technically they (whoever) had a case, so I had the engineers point a Link camera and the tiny CCD at the official setup chart.
Well, they had part of a case – the Link camera, with its huge lens, was sharper in the middle of the chart where the main graticules were, but then it went softer and softer the further you went from the centre. The CCD was a touch softer in the middle, but stayed the same right to the edge. In addition it lacked the tube lag and various electronic sharpeners built into the Link camera. All in all, subjectively the CCD was better, and went into use in the quiet corner of BBC Continuity without any complaint from anyone.
Twenty or so years on, and indeed before, I’ve had many many discussions on what is or is not broadcastable, and the most recent was at a get-together in London in 2004. Someone told me that DV and digital transmission are just not broadcast quality. This is slightly flying in the face of the facts, because both are going strong all over the world, but I know what he was saying. And it did light up in me the old question – “what actually is broadcast quality?”, as in “how do you define what is technically allowable?” Someone was asking for submissions for the GTC Zerb magazine, so I wrote a piece on broadcast quality. I suggested that maybe the person I had the original discussion with could refute my ideas, and they’d have an interesting article.
Somehow it didn’t quite work that way, because the published result rather metamorphosed into the on-going “producers can’t camera as well as cameramen” DV stuff – something else entirely. So, as a person who enjoys a good discussion, I thought that maybe some people other than me would like to have their say on the subject. As well as sending in more pics (always appeciated of course), anyone who wants to write a piece to refute, qualifiy, extend, or whatever, please email it, and I’ll tag it onto the end of the page I’m creating which starts with my original text – here
June 2004
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The controversial subject of DV
Just before I left the BBC in 2001 some stuff I read wound me up enough to write an article about the changing market in tv as applied to the camera area – ie DV.
I thought then that the various arguments were pretty old hat, given that by that time I’d been pointing one for more than five years. I was somewhat amazed therefore to hear all the old stuff again the other day in August 2004, three more years on. I thought I’d say my piece again, so here’s the original article written for the Guild of Television Cameramen Newsletter May 2001.
This is me with the BBC’s first DV kit in 1996 having fun in a rescue helicopter over the North Sea. It was a three DV camera shoot – one on the ground operated by the researcher, one on a boat operated by the reporter, and one in the air operated by the producer (me).
The rushes just blew us and everyone else on the team away – I was pretty sure we could deliver something worth having, but they were magic, and I still have them stashed away to prove it. Cost of the days shoot – well, the dv kits cost £4000 each and were used for a long time and I still have one here and workable 8 years on, so lets say £10 each for the day. Cost of three tapes – £30. Cost of hire car, production staff, hotels etc – same as they would have cost anyway, less crew T and D. So operating cost for the day’s three camera shoot – £60. That’s why the market has changed.
