News: 1589873349

... the BBC appears to be more interested in watching you than you watching it.

Presumably then "Together" will allow the BBC to extend their reach by seeing who your friends and associates are.

It isn't so much watching us as making sure we have paid the licence fee and are in the UK.

I was thinking something along those lines.

Are there actually that many people who care about watching any programme at the same time as their friends/ family etc?

I ask as someone who only turns a TV on at New Year's Eve for my wife who likes that kind of thing.

Well yeah lots of people watch sport together of course. Lots of people (used to) get together for shows like Bake Off, Masterchef, as a social event. Probably others. When we relied on live TV this was actually much easier so this is recapturing something that's lost through on-demand services.

I am sure it's a bit of a niche thing, but it seems a nice enough feature especially during lockdown.

The BBC still hasn't rolled out sign-on for iPlayer on Kodi.

Bake off is on Channel 4! Although a group watch of Doctors is more abpt

you can watch reruns from the BBC2 days, maybe.

I am not a network person, so please bear with me. My question is, how much could the synchronisation be screwed up by network latency effects?

Different viewers could be in different parts of the country, using different ISPs, and with different equipment and quality of connection between them and the Beeb.

To enable people to enjoy a big reveal or a punchline together, the sync would have to be pretty good - no more than a second out, say.

Even assuming no buffering, which would really screw things up, how feasible is it to maintain almost perfect synchronisation over, say, an hour?

Even assuming no buffering

You need at least enough buffering so that the lowest latency link is delayed to match the highest latency link. At least in principle, each frame has a time code defining when it should be presented to the user (relative to the start of the programme). If you can measure the latency, or estimate it, you can adjust the effective reference clock to ensure each frame is presented to everyone at roughly the same time.

You can use direct feedback from the player app to give you latency information or estimate it based on the requests you're getting for the next chunk of programme material. You can change the effective reference clock either directly in the data stream, by adding and removing frames from individual streams or by adding further metadata. If there's a substantial difference in bandwidth, you can use adaptive streaming to change the quality. I'm not sure exactly how the BBC are doing it, but it should be possible to do it with less variation than people chatting about it on their mobile phones at the same time will experience.

I must then be an antisocial abnormality, because I can't get it why the fuck would anyone watch in sync something, anything, remotely with their "mates" (as in "friends", rather than "sexual partners") hundreds of miles away, etc. I get that you might want to watch something together, because a) there's something interesting on the telly / usb stick AND b), you happen to be living in the same household, aka "a family", (and 50 years later it gives you those fond memories you were one loving family, cause you 'always' watched robin the hooded man together. But I don't get the remote ersatz at all. I might just as well watch the same youtube video with millions of other mates at the same time. Or do something better with my time.

...

on the other hand, probably million of Brits sat at exactly the same time - "together" - to watch Boris Johnson say nothing one day and not much earlier, they sat "together" to watch a rather old lady say nothing, they got up and felt, presumably, some much more "we're all in it together" (never mind those wrinklies dying quietly away from their mates in care homes). And an unspecified number open their windows every Thursday and clap their hands "together", rather than start thinking why it is that they pay their 1st world taxes in 1st world country and, in return, get a non-1st world country daily health care system because the health care system is chronically underfunded and mis-managed by every next government?

Don't worry, nobody wants to watch with you.

You mention YouTube... YT and FB both allow scheduled viewings. FB has "watch party" so you can have a online chat built in as you watch together (I haven't used it myself but I think that's the idea).

In the modern world, people view being together remotely as still being together. Video-chat probably makes a huge difference compared to just being on the phone.

Yeah, cos you have multiple millions of mates.

But don't understand the need for human contact.

I guess you're just so lovely they flock to you....

As a trendy tech company I am a little surprised Netflix hasn't added 'social' functionality so you can have 'friends' on their system - recommend shows to each other, see your mates' reviews and comments, etc. Adding communal viewing would then be a natural evolution. Integrating their own chat, or Twitter, even VOIP (like multiplayer gaming but for TV).

I am not saying I WANT these features because I fear it would be a mess of "Jeff just watched Tiger King" but it does seem like something a lot of younger users would use!

On streamed content.

It's really not that hard BBC...

The subtitles are probably there but only availably on the Teletext channel.

iPlayer supports subtitles. I use them, and can't remember the last time I watched something on iPlayer where it didn't have subtitles available

Does this use multicasting in an attempt to cut down on bandwidth? This could be a blessing in disguise.

..."We want to BBC Together"?

(I shall avoid googling whether anyone else already thought of that...)