olympic coverage on Freeview

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Mad Scientist
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#649799 2-Jul-2012 21:46

olympics? does it have rugby 15s? does it have any National party dirt to be dug? if not then probably not worth letting the public know eh ...

having said that Sky usually advertises heavily for sporting events to gain subscribers but ... who knows!

maybe it's a government ploy to keep the working class in the dark so they won't lose productivity!

i have to say i really don't have time to watch 23 hrs of one channel let alone 24 hrs of SIX! (darn the good old student years!)

freitasm

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#667701 5-Aug-2012 10:09

Quite happy with the Prime coverage of Olympics 2012. Have been recording and watching some of the events...

Who needs Sky? ;)

mattRSK

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#667716 5-Aug-2012 10:58

freitasm: Quite happy with the Prime coverage of Olympics 2012. Have been recording and watching some of the events...

Who needs Sky? ;)

We have seen a lot of coverage of the New Zealand teams, it's been great. Trouble for us is that the picture is not very good on prime tv. Watching through UHF freeview and it often randomly pixelates and freezes. Never happened on prime until the Olympics started.

sxz

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#667717 5-Aug-2012 11:01

mattRSK:
freitasm: Quite happy with the Prime coverage of Olympics 2012. Have been recording and watching some of the events...

Who needs Sky? ;)

We have seen a lot of coverage of the New Zealand teams, it's been great. Trouble for us is that the picture is not very good on prime tv. Watching through UHF freeview and it often randomly pixelates and freezes. Never happened on prime until the Olympics started.

Sounds like you need to check your aerial.

Prime has been fantastic, nothing but praise from me!

freitasm

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#667718 5-Aug-2012 11:05

mattRSK:
freitasm: Quite happy with the Prime coverage of Olympics 2012. Have been recording and watching some of the events...

Who needs Sky? ;)

We have seen a lot of coverage of the New Zealand teams, it's been great. Trouble for us is that the picture is not very good on prime tv. Watching through UHF freeview and it often randomly pixelates and freezes. Never happened on prime until the Olympics started.

Yes, check your aerial - it's been great.

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#667736 5-Aug-2012 11:41

I cleared a lot of junk off my TiVo and set it to record all the coverage on PRIME. Have been enjoying it very much!
Looking forward to track and field finals.

Cheers,
Joseph

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#667742 5-Aug-2012 11:57

Our TiVo remote control died... And the HDD in our HTPC died at the same time. Lucky I had a spare HDD, swapped, restored an image from the Acronis backup from previous day and didn't lose anything...

Then the motherboard died - lucky Dell arranged a replacement motherboard in less than 24 hours, technician came in, replaced it, and we're back in business

We never had so much live TV recordings going on - almost 100% of Prime being recorded daily. Lucky the new HDD was a larger one ;)

We might never watch the whole thing, but who knows...

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#667777 5-Aug-2012 13:33

freitasm:
mattRSK:
freitasm: Quite happy with the Prime coverage of Olympics 2012. Have been recording and watching some of the events...

Who needs Sky? ;)

We have seen a lot of coverage of the New Zealand teams, it's been great. Trouble for us is that the picture is not very good on prime tv. Watching through UHF freeview and it often randomly pixelates and freezes. Never happened on prime until the Olympics started.

Yes, check your aerial - it's been great.

I think it may have something to do with this,

"Freeview|HD viewers in Canterbury: if you continue to experience reception issues since last Tuesday's MED Frequency Change, please contact the Ministry's Retune Helpline on 0508 33 66 33 to escalate the issue."

But I will have a play with the aerial and see if I can get any results.

lchiu7

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#667833 5-Aug-2012 16:25

mattRSK:
freitasm: Quite happy with the Prime coverage of Olympics 2012. Have been recording and watching some of the events...

Who needs Sky? ;)

We have seen a lot of coverage of the New Zealand teams, it's been great. Trouble for us is that the picture is not very good on prime tv. Watching through UHF freeview and it often randomly pixelates and freezes. Never happened on prime until the Olympics started.

Me too and I know it's not my aerial because I had it all checked a couple of months ago and I have no such problems on other channels (even in HD when the bit rate is higher).

As an aside while Prime might be showing more Olympic content than last time, it seems rather backward that for those of us who don't subscribe to Sky Sports and the HD ticket, we are seeing the Olympics in SD, stereo whereas last time we saw the live events in HD 5.1 audio.

When I look back at the recordings I made last time, and compare the PQ with what I am getting now (not to mention the AQ), it's night and day.

What's even more interesting is whenever you see a shot of a cameraman, it looks like they are using 3D cameras. I wonder who gets to see 3D content?

Staying in Wellington. Check out my AirBnB in the Wellington CBD. https://www.airbnb.co.nz/h/wellycbd PM me and mention GZ to get a 15% discount and no AirBnB charges.

lchiu7

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#667920 5-Aug-2012 19:36

Just as an aside I noticed again on Prime that they were advertising all their coverage is available free on isky.co.nz to all New Zealanders. But when I went to look and signed up for an account, as soon as I tried to view some coverage, I received a message saying only for Sky Sports subscribers.

I would have thought that Sky Sport subscribers was a subset of all New Zealanders?

Staying in Wellington. Check out my AirBnB in the Wellington CBD. https://www.airbnb.co.nz/h/wellycbd PM me and mention GZ to get a 15% discount and no AirBnB charges.

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#668133 6-Aug-2012 10:41

Agreed with all of the above. We (the non Sky HD paying NZ public) have been shafted picture quality wise this time around. I think what they are showing is good, I have no beef with that actually, just the quality is very unfortunate given we've gone backwards from the HD 5.1 coverage we had last time.

I think prime is being shown on iSKY for free, but you will need to be a paid Sky sports subscriber to view any other sporting channels on iSKY. I might be wrong, do they have a dedicated olympic channel on there free? I doubt it, I thought it was only Prime for non subscribers.

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#668163 6-Aug-2012 11:27

Must say I've been a bit dissappointed with coverage on Prime. This may just because I haven't been watching enough, but over the course of the first few days the only thing they ever seemed to be showing when I flicked it on was rowing. They would pepper it with explanations of other events, but then they would cut back to rowing; almost like they're saying "Look at all these other cool events you could be watching if you only had sky" ;-) Ok I did see a wee bit of fencing and judo coverage, but it seemed pretty minimal IMO.

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#668184 6-Aug-2012 12:05

Back on the subject of quality, rather than content, I've seen a small amount of coverage on Prime via DVB-S FTA since I can't get DVB-T. I too have noticed digital artifacts not normally present. Predominantly this is blockiness on object edges during fast transitions within a scene or more generally immediately after a scene change. At times it really is quite bad. I attribute this to one or both of two things: uncorrected errors in the data stream from mobile cameras, and excessive compression in the link from London to NZ.

Since, I assume, the same video source is used for broadcast via DVB-S and DVB-T, this could both confirm the OP's observation and perhaps shed some light on the cause.

In my case, it cannot be antenna alignment as I don't have one. It is very unlikely to be a dish alignment problem either. I've seen it only on video from London via Prime; not on their local studio content, their other programming, or on any other service.

lchiu7

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#668188 6-Aug-2012 12:11

Maybe we should count our blessings, as little as they are. Apparently in the US NBC declined to show the 100m mens final live because they thought they would get better ratings if shown in prime time!

As I am work I don't know if Prime showed it live but I am guessing they did?

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#668198 6-Aug-2012 12:20

xarqi: Back on the subject of quality, rather than content, I've seen a small amount of coverage on Prime via DVB-S FTA since I can't get DVB-T. I too have noticed digital artifacts not normally present. Predominantly this is blockiness on object edges during fast transitions within a scene or more generally immediately after a scene change. At times it really is quite bad. I attribute this to one or both of two things: uncorrected errors in the data stream from mobile cameras, and excessive compression in the link from London to NZ.

Your assumptions are wrong. The blockiness on Prime is 100% due to Sky playing out a very low bitrate stream into the encoders that feed the local Optus D1 feed and the DVB-T feed. Plenty of other evidence of this minimal bitrate philosophy applied to a lot of Sky delayed content on Prime. Sky's Prime DVB-S transmission is one of the lowest quality Sky standard definition streams I've seen and only ever sample its hideousness. I tried to watch Top Gear once and was nearly sick as it looked so bad.

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