It seems to be necessary on news programs to have someone at the scene of the news for no apparent reason.
T'other night it was "Now over to Fred Bloggs at Hove Crown Court". As it was 6:45 the court was closed so there was no point in Fred being there.
However, why is there such a long delay between the studio presenter saying "Whats happening" and Fred replying?
With modern communication I can't see why there should be any delay at all.
The speed of light hasn't increased lately and delays for encoding and buffering have ...
Not to mention the countless BBC reporters hanging around in Athens.
But it doesn't seem to affect mobile phones etc?
Mobile phone calls do have small buffering/encoding delays, more noticeable if you call someone in the same room, but signal tends to only travel tens or hundreds of miles, signals between studio and presenter outside the courthouse can travel tens of thousands of miles...
It's not such a stupid question. Isn't the answer, in part at least, that 15+ years ago ENG (Electronic News Gathering) would likley as not be done over a point-to-point microwave link, but now they are all SNG over geostationary satellite with their inherent latency?
How often do you phone someone that is in the same room as you?
Mobile phone signals are processed for delay equalisation as standard - part of the process to remove/reduce the effects of multipath propagation. there is more information in each data packet than just the voice message.
The reasoning is c*ck anyway - the phones do not talk to one another directly, even if they are in the same room.
Judging by the dish antennae on the roofs of the ENG vans, I always assumed that was the case.
Often, when testing phones.
Bill
Welcome to the wonderful world of digital. All digital signals are delayed in one way or another. With pictures, even more.
And on a live broadcast, the 'other end' will be using off air for comms. And that is even more delayed.
It certainly does. But not to a noticeable extent.
It's very noticeable with digital radio mics. If you have another cabled mic in the same location, the digital one is noticeably late.
For testing VoIP, quite frequently.
Did I say they did? It's just that *being* in the same room, hearing the person live as well as through the mobile network makes the delay noticeable ...
Ah, good point.
But most of the pictures in newspapers like the Sun are going to be of things or people which their readers are already familiar with. Pictures of celebrities, politicians, footballers, birds with big t*ts etc etc. And except for the t*ts, it's not that different in most papers, come to that. Just how many different photographs of Angelas Merkel does anyone need to see ? Fully clothed at least.
michael adams
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It's probably a satellite link. Speed of light effect.
Another Dave
Yup. Hence analogue time pips are ahead of their digital counterparts.
Whilst I, otoh, can see *every* reason why 'modern communication techniques' could account for this delay. :-)
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