Forum for former BBC staff

Forum for former BBC staff
http://www.ex-bbc.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl >> Nations, Regions, and Local Radio. >> ViLoR Failure http://www.ex-bbc.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?num=1504304079 Message started by Administrator on Sep 1^st, 2017, 10:15pm

Title: ViLoR Failure
Post by Administrator on Sep 1^st, 2017, 10:15pm

An equipment failure- possibly at BT Oxford - caused 18 BBC Local Radio Stations to fall silent for a period during the morning of Friday 1st September.

"Radio Today" says, here, that 33 transmitters were quiet until the stations started to re-broadcast Radio fivelive. It went on to report that BT had confirmed that "the issue was caused by an engineer carrying out pre-work activities in Oxford where a fibre tray was disturbed at the time of the incident."

More about ViLoR (Virtual Local Radio) may be found, here, a BBC Media Centre announcement from 2014.

"To the presenters and production teams the studios will appear much like traditional studios but with the underlying equipment and infrastructure moved to a central, shared, location. Editorial teams will have full control over the play-out system and mixing desks, but the actual audio files will be stored, streamed, mixed and processed in a remote data centre, in real-time. Importantly, the system was designed to ensure that only the back-end equipment is centralised so that editorial and production teams can continue to present from the local community just as they do today."

Title: Re: ViLoR Failure
Post by Amigo on Sep 2^nd, 2017, 8:30am

Bill Rogers ("trading as wdr" here) writes:-

"The economics of VILOR looked sound enough. Introduced first in 2014, the idea is that the old, multifarious computer systems in all stations, set to grow to 800, could be replaced by services delivered down a pipe, with lower capital and maintenance costs.

Expect those costs to double, as stations demand a back up THEY can operate when London fails."

Anyone in Local Radio from the early years remember plugging a
Roberts Radio (battery-powered with a PO jack on the side), to feed Radio Two or a
Uher 4000 Report L (also battery-powered) direct to their transmitter when the studios lost electric?

I do. Radio Stoke circa 1968. Fond memories.
Transmitter- singular. There was no Medium Wave or DAB service in those days!

It must have been very frustrating....