100% Increase In Video Choice! (a.k.a BBCi News Multiscreen on Freeview gets a bit bigger)

Published on 24 February 2007 in , , , , ,

It was great to see the new look BBCi News Multiscreen launch on digital terrestrial television at around 11:10 on Thursday morning – now with 100% more video options! (well four choices instead of 2 is a 100% increase!)

The TV on my desk was tuned in watching the magic happen – especially fun when a few minutes before, all the video changed to new format, which looked especially good with the old template overlaid on top of it! That might have confused a few people!

It was also great to see Jane Hill on News 24 at 1:30 bigging up the changes – as the News 24 team were doing most of the day.

Less good was that a bug was found just over an hour after launch, that had slipped through our QA process. Ack, c’est la vie! This time it was easy to fix, and it was done mid afternoon in time for a few celebratory drinks.

Of course it would have been even nicer if we’d been able to provide a full six screen service like satellite and Virgin’s customers in the ex-Telewest area, however unfortunately we simply don’t have the bandwidth for the extra two lots of audio, and it would also be a bit of a struggle to fit them all in at a reasonable size on screen. The version on satellite for example, has video windows which are pretty tiny, however they can at least be zoomed to a bigger size. However to do that on DTT, we’d need functionality that’s (sadly) not currently present on most boxes currently in the Freeview market (although hopefully soon will be).