{"id":7145,"date":"2018-07-12T16:56:23","date_gmt":"2018-07-12T15:56:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/?p=7145"},"modified":"2018-07-12T16:56:23","modified_gmt":"2018-07-12T15:56:23","slug":"radio-is-fastest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/2018\/07\/radio-is-fastest\/","title":{"rendered":"Radio is Fastest"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you wanted to know what was happening in Moscow as fast as possible last night, your best bet was the radio. <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve mentioned before that when a big fixture goes to penalties, I always listen on the radio, because I get the news first. More regularly, if there&#8217;s a match that&#8217;s both being covered by Five Live and Sky TV, I might have the TV switched on in my lounge, but the radio on in my kitchen. If I hear a goal described on the radio, I know that I can take my time strolling into my lounge to see the goal scored.<\/p>\n<p>This was beautifully illustrated in a Tweet that showed some Brazilian fans watching a game on a big screen, with one fan listening to the radio:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">one guy with a radio vs everyone else with (lagged) tv screen&#8230; <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/uw2bu6grwc\">pic.twitter.com\/uw2bu6grwc<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Arthur Charpentier &#x1f33c; (@freakonometrics) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/freakonometrics\/status\/1013942241633734657?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">July 3, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>During the England semi-final, at a point of tension, I decided to see what got me news from Russia fastest. Here are my non-scientific findings in order:<\/p>\n<p><em>Fastest to Slowest<\/em><\/p>\n<p>BBC Radio Five Live AM<\/p>\n<p>&#8212;  ~0.2 seconds ahead of &#8212;<\/p>\n<p>BBC Radio Five Live DAB<\/p>\n<p>&#8212;  ~5 seconds ahead of &#8212;<\/p>\n<p>ITV Freeview SD<br \/>\nITV Freeview HD<br \/>\nITV Sky HD<\/p>\n<p>(All TV roughly the same)<\/p>\n<p>I didn&#8217;t bother with streams because they introduce too many variables based on the technology I&#8217;m using, the internet speeds I have, and so on. But I do know that UHD is especially slower than other streaming options. I also noted earlier in the tournament that BBC&#8217;s VR experiment delivered video faster than regular iPlayer! (I was, however, completely underwhelmed by the VR experience)<\/p>\n<p>Note that I can&#8217;t accurately measure the time because I comparing things I can see myself with things that are being described by a commentator. In other words, radio is perhaps even further ahead than I&#8217;m estimating here, since the radio commentator has had to see and describe something before I hear it. On TV, I can simply see the net bulge with a goal.<\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s more, I&#8217;m told that AM is deliberately delayed by about a second &#8211; perhaps to keep it closer in sync with DAB. <\/p>\n<p>I suspect that the overall delay is closer to 10 seconds for events happening in a stadium and me seeing them on a television. There will be uplinks and downlinks from the venue to the broadcast centre, then more from the broadcast centre to the UK broadcaster&#8217;s playout systems. Then that signal too is probably propagated by satellite to many transmitters and direct-to-home satellites. Each satellite &#8220;hop&#8221; might take 250 milliseconds, and then there encoding and decoding delays to account for. Finally a broadcaster may deliberately introduce a delay to ensure that they can cut the picture in case something happens that they don&#8217;t want to show (the equivalent of the &#8220;dump&#8221; button in many radio studios).<\/p>\n<p>All of this shows that if you want to know what&#8217;s happening fastest, radio gets there first.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you wanted to know what was happening in Moscow as fast as possible last night, your best bet was the radio. I&#8217;ve mentioned before that when a big fixture goes to penalties, I always listen on the radio, because I get the news first. More regularly, if there&#8217;s a match that&#8217;s both being covered [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,7],"tags":[888,29,580,107],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7145"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7145"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7145\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7147,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7145\/revisions\/7147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}