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GB News

ASharpe

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4 Feb 2013
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Just tuned in to the new GB News on Freeview. The audio and video quality is on par with the shopping channels and almost unintelligible.

I had a look to see if I could cast to my TV but it seems not.

What does everyone else think of GB News?
 
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birchesgreen

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I found it amusing that for a channel which spent it's launch hour going on about free speech and dissenting opinions, the first dissenting opinion from the guy from the i newspaper got shot down nearly immediately :lol:
 

ASharpe

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I liked the idea of it - but everyone (except Neil Oliver) is just shouting at and over each other and it's impossible to follow without a lot of concentration.

I'll maybe try a few other shows over the next week.
 

Scotrail12

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I enjoyed Dan Wootton at TalkRadio and his show here is equally good but they do need to stick to their word on allowing discussion of opposing views - I feel it is 3 vs 1 with the political panel tonight.

They need to fix their sound as well.
 

37424

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I will give it a watch over the next few days out of curiosity but I'm not a right winger, I cannot stand Dan Wootton the most useful thing he can do as far as I'm concerned is go back to New Zealand, also Michelle Dewberry. If its just going to be Pro Brexit anti lockdown propaganda channel like Talk Radio then I wont be watching it at least hopefully we will be spared Julia hyphen, never put into a few words what you can put into many, Brewer.
 

eMeS

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I dipped in after 8pm and couldn't believe at how soft the video was. Almost as though the video bandwidth is being throttled somewhere. I'll give it a another chance in a day or so. For me, it's unwatchable at the moment.
 

HSTEd

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I dipped in after 8pm and couldn't believe at how soft the video was. Almost as though the video bandwidth is being throttled somewhere. I'll give it a another chance in a day or so. For me, it's unwatchable at the moment.

I looked it up, using the old MPEG-2 encryption and an average bit rate on order of only 1MBps, operating at only 544x576.
(For reference BBC News normally runs about 1.9MBps)

Nevermind that I can't see why you would launch a new channel using MPEG-2 in 2021.....

How many non-HD receivers exist these days?
 

birchesgreen

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I liked how in the introduction hour they kept going on about how they would be covering different stories and not the same obsessions of the LoNdOn MaInStReAm MeDiA. They were going to cover the stories that were missed or suppressed...

Sounds great, so what were the first topics in the first proper programme: lockdown, taking the knee and Meghan. Oh.
 

nlogax

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Watched it. Part amused by the Poundland approach to it all (shakycam and a low rent Freeview slot with MPEG-2 Legovision, nice). Part bored by how enamored they seem to be by their own shiny new lukewarm takes on current events. As if no-one on TV news has had opinions before. What a dirge.
 

jfollows

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I give it a year . Tops
That's essentially what The Guardian says (https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-...ew-neils-alternative-bbc-utterly-deadly-stuff) but what's probably more telling is that The Times is only vaguely lukewarm.

The Times: (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/gb-news-review-too-early-judge-nigel-farage-andrew-neil-xx6h8wgtv)
You cannot fairly judge a channel promising to broadcast 6,500 hours a year on its opening minutes, although I am sure that Neil will have been hoping for far fewer technology fails. By the end of the week we should have more of a feel as to whether “unwoke” TV will capture the public’s imagination.

I'm personally uninterested in the concept of news channels which tell me what to think - I see this as the import of the US position in which news channels shout their opinions at you and the one which sticks best wins. So although I do watch CNN because I'm interested in the US perspective, I find some of its shouty broadcasters objectionable for pushing their opinions even though I tend to agree with them.

The US market shows that the sort of "news" pushed by GB News is what has won there - I hope that doesn't happen here but I'm not confident.
 

birchesgreen

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I watched a bit more this morning, the breakfast show wasn't too bad. The presenters didn't try to talk over each other (too much). Still the same subjects you can get anywhere though, i genuinely would like a news channel which presented news stories which got ignored or missed elsewhere but as yet no evidence GB News will be any different to the rest.
 

ainsworth74

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Yes I dipped in for the breakfast show this morning (basically the only time I watch TV news is as background to breakfast) and it was okay. Didn't seem like Fox News wrapped up in the Union Flag like the more shrill parts of the Twitterverse had been raving about. They also use the Met Office for their weather coverage so that's a big tick in the box for me :lol: But it didn't seem to be anything particularly special or different about the twenty odd minutes of coverage I caught. Might try it again tomorrow. Might also try and catch the 'flagship' Andrew Neil slot. Whilst he can be a bit of a blowhard and I do have a fair bit of time for him as an interviewer/journalist.

I didn't spot any technical issues this morning and the video quality seemed comparable to BBC or Sky (I was watching on Sky) though their graphics felt a bit amateurish in comparison to the other two.
 

Typhoon

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I watched a bit more this morning, the breakfast show wasn't too bad. The presenters didn't try to talk over each other (too much). Still the same subjects you can get anywhere though, i genuinely would like a news channel which presented news stories which got ignored or missed elsewhere but as yet no evidence GB News will be any different to the rest.
Exactly. I only really listen to or watch local news programmes now (plus Broadcasting House for its quirky elements), if there appears to be a national story I need to be aware of, I can check in on the BBC News website. What I don't get is the regional news from elsewhere (eg WestMids, where I used to live), 'From Our Reporters' seemed to promise that. All I heard was 'Child migrant crisis in Kent' (last year's news that hasn't gone away), 'Taking the knee' and 'Liposuction' - and a lot of opinion. They have had a lot of time to prepare for this, has there been anything that could be called a scoop?

And, to misquote Eric Morecambe, I heard one contribution which probably used all the right words, but not necessarily in the right order. It wasn't a guest!
 

Ediswan

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Just tried it on Freesat (216). The picture is HD. The sound is fine. It would be better if the two were in sync.
 

matt_world2004

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On Freesat the studio shots are out of sync but anything involving a non studio shot is in sync. The technical quality here is terrible.
 

37424

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Just tried it on Freesat (216). The picture is HD. The sound is fine. It would be better if the two were in sync.
I'm watching it on Freeview 236 on 43" TV and the picture quality looks awful, especially if compare it to the non HD BBC news channel on 231
 

Ediswan

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On Freesat the studio shots are out of sync but anything involving a non studio shot is in sync. The technical quality here is terrible.
The out of sync shot I saw on Freesat was from a rugby ground, not studio. (I only watched for a minute or two.)
 

brad465

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The channel has an ironic name: called GB News, but as has been discovered elsewhere, it's ownership has almost nothing to do with the UK. Even Andrew Neil IIRC is registered as living in the south of France (or at least residing there enough to own a property in it).
 

Dai Corner

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Presenters are trying to make light of the technical 'gremlins' (as they put it).

Worst one I've seen so far is losing the sound at the start of the PM's statement at 1800. I'm not sure how long it took them to find it as I switched to another channel to hear what he had to say.
 

py_megapixel

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Picture is very soft, and the on-screen graphics are huge by british standards giving it quite a tacky feel.
Also, they need their microphones positioned closer to the people speaking!

Don't know if anybody noticed just now but they cut to a correspondent and forgot to mute the mics in the studio so you could hear background noise and echo.
They fixed it once, and now they've done it again!
 

DynamicSpirit

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I found it amusing that for a channel which spent it's launch hour going on about free speech and dissenting opinions, the first dissenting opinion from the guy from the i newspaper got shot down nearly immediately :lol:

Do you mean the panel discussion on Sunday evening about the lockdown? If so, I watched that, and I don't think he was getting shot down in a bad way - just having a debate where other people were disagreeing with him. You could quibble with that he was basically one voice arguing against 3 people on the other side, so he was outnumbered. But I don't that debate was inconsistent with the line GBNews is pushing about free speech. The point is that the other people were disagreeing with him on the substance of what he said, and saying why they disagreed - they weren't just trying to shut him up by accusing him of being a racist/homophobe/misogynist/something-else-o-phobe, which is the real point GB News seems to be making about free speech and dissenting opinions.
 

birchesgreen

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Do you mean the panel discussion on Sunday evening about the lockdown? If so, I watched that, and I don't think he was getting shot down in a bad way - just having a debate where other people were disagreeing with him. You could quibble with that he was basically one voice arguing against 3 people on the other side, so he was outnumbered. But I don't that debate was inconsistent with the line GBNews is pushing about free speech. The point is that the other people were disagreeing with him on the substance of what he said, and saying why they disagreed - they weren't just trying to shut him up by accusing him of being a racist/homophobe/misogynist/something-else-o-phobe, which is the real point GB News seems to be making about free speech and dissenting opinions.
The presenter spoke over him repeatedly, it wasn't a good start.
 

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