BBCoverIP

It's election night in the UK, a time for celebration. Usually by this stage in the proceedings (based on approximately one previous occasion), I am quite sozzled but because of the time difference I'm just getting started. [The UK general election drinking games is basically "Drink if... you feel like it"]. The amazing thing is not that I can watch the BBC election coverage, but if anything it's the difficulty in finding it. As I insist on telling people whether they ask or not, I don't have TV in the conventional sense: after my somewhat dubious "free" cable TV disappeared at the end of last year, I've been limited to bad reception of broadcast TV, and have basically stopped watching live TV entirely. Instead I rely on my if anything even more dubious implementation of IPTV through methods that are generally acknowledged to be at the fringes of legality. That's fine for most of the time, except when there are major events of interest. For example, the Eurovision Song Contest, or national elections. For these, I have to hunt out live webcasts. For Eurovision, there are good webcasts from the main event itself (although sadly lacking the wit and wisdom of Terry Wogan, which is a shame). For this UK election, I really had to do some lateral thinking. The local TV stations are a complete loss: obviously one expects nothing from the main networks, but you'd hope for something from the PBS stations, which spend most of their time reshowing BBC sitcoms. Sadly not. And the BBC itself, while it is pretty free and easy with putting its radio output out on the internet, it's remarkably difficult to find anything useful TV-wise. Used to be that you could pick up BBC world or BBC news 24 streaming through a third party site, but sadly that disappeared a long time back.

So currently I am tuned into C-Span2 on cspan.orgwhich is delivering a live rendition of the BBC1 coverage via several levels of transcoding to my TV set (via the Internet). This seems to work. I'm not sure if the BBC mind. Actually, checking their website, it does seem like the beeb is trying to stream some of their live TV coverage, but at least at first try it doesn't seem to be working. Perhaps it's overloaded with other internet viewers, which would be something worth remarking on, I suppose. It's hard to tell, but if anything the C-span stream looks rather better, since the BBC does seem to have the annoying habit of encoding its video at ridiculously low bandwidths for internet delivery.

Updates later if I can be arsed, but short of any Ghostwatch-style upsets (and some of the beeb coverage so far suggests that they aren't taking it entirely seriously) there won't be any.

Oh good lord, what is Jon Peter Snow doing with his "race for downing street" 3D animation?