[TimG]

Individuals should be able to buy the feed from BBO and set up their own pay-per-view vugraph show!

Sort of in the same way I imagine people can buy server time and set up their own pay tournaments, probably paying an extra fee if BBO handles the money transactions.

[Walddk]

TimG, on Oct 18 2008, 05:11 PM, said:

Individuals should be able to buy the feed from BBO and set up their own pay-per-view vugraph show!

Suggestions as to how it should be in the future are excellent but not really relevant. This is not going to happen any time soon according to Fred. It would be more interesting to hear what can/should be done as it is now.

Tim did contribute, but most people did not. They are virtually all English speaking and perhaps can't see the problem. I realise that we won't get the views of the Poles, Turks, Chinese and Italians, but one could still voice one's opinion as to whether one should show consideration towards those groups or not.

Or should they just learn English and make it a non-issue? Or to turn it around: should people from English speaking countries learn other languages? Just the basic stuff in order to get the gist of the commentary in a foreign language.

Provocative perhaps, but isn't it a fact the we speak too few languages?

Roland

[TimG]

Walddk, on Oct 18 2008, 04:38 PM, said:

Provocative perhaps, but isn't it a fact the we speak too few languages?

Or, maybe there are too many languages.

I know I've made my opinion clear, but I have little sympathy for uni-linguists (I am one) who complain about the rest of the world not accommodating us (am do not). It is nice of you to be concerned about the complaints (of which there seem to be few) but really I think you should briefly explain to those people the reason for the current policy and leave it at that. You'll never please everyone.

[geller]

In the recent WMSG seniors Japan faced USA in the finals, so it worked out nicely to have English language commentary in the open room and Japanese in the closed. The Japanese language commentary got good viewership in Japan. I can assure everyone that most of the Japanese specs would not have really been able to get into the English language commentary (although most would have understood some).

Incidentally, I'm not sure the English speaking readers here (unless they also are fluent in another language) realize how much effort Fred and Uday have put into supporting languages other than English on BBO. This has been a great boon for bridge everywhere.

-Bob

[Walddk]

Maybe I am preaching to the choir, but in Beijing we had ten simultaneous tables most of the time, eight after the youth events finished. When we had ten, seven of those had English commentary, three had "other". With eight it was 5/3. In no match did we not have English.

What strikes me as interesting is that the complaints I got were all from English speaking people, not a single from "other".

Roland

[Aberlour10]

It's hard to make some suggestions to this topic, because in my opinion it is classic no-win-situtation, but...this results from opulence/richness of BBO Vugraph offer. I think people who complain about "trifles" should think a minute about it.

Robert

[Cascade]

Roland choice is good. Keep doing what you are doing.

[NickRW]

Walddk, on Oct 18 2008, 10:23 PM, said:

Maybe I am preaching to the choir, but in Beijing we had ten simultaneous tables most of the time, eight after the youth events finished. When we had ten, seven of those had English commentary, three had "other". With eight it was 5/3. In no match did we not have English.

What strikes me as interesting is that the complaints I got were all from English speaking people, not a single from "other".

Roland

Well tell the English speaking complainers, politely, to drop dead then.

Native English speakers are in a privileged position as it is - it isn't right to expect it to be 100% English commentary.

Nick

P.S. If they ask for 100% English, tell them they can have 100% International Language - Esperanto - that should shut them up.

[matmat]

Walddk, on Oct 18 2008, 05:23 PM, said:

What strikes me as interesting is that the complaints I got were all from English speaking people, not a single from "other".

This probably has to do with native english speakers (and i think this applies more to americans than it does to brittons, but i could be wrong) don't really bother learning foreign languages assuming that everyone else will speak english...

[peachy]

I think it is good to have commentaries in other languages. Still, the international language of bridge is English so if there is commentary only in one language, that would be English. I guess lucky for those who speak no other language than English, but the kibs come from all over the world, not just from English-speaking countries plus the country that is playing on Vugraph at the time.

Roland did not like to hear viewers' opinion on this and it is his privilege to feel that way. But how else is he going to find out what viewers' preferences are if the viewers should stop sending him chat or e-mail about their preferences? Assumedly public service still aims at serving the public and if the public has preferences, what is wrong with listening to them?

I know, I know!!!!! It is a voluntary job and well done Roland! And we shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth and so on and so on.

[Walddk]

peachy, on Oct 19 2008, 04:42 PM, said:

Roland did not like to hear viewers' opinion on this and it is his privilege to feel that way.  But how else is he going to find out what viewers' preferences are if the viewers should stop sending him chat or e-mail about their preferences?  Assumedly public service still aims at serving the public and if the public has preferences, what is wrong with listening to them?

You must have misunderstood. I do indeed want to listen and I take complaints seriously. If my wish was to dictate everything, there would have been no need to raise the topic in Forums. This is what I wrote in my initial post:

Tolerance and understanding are the key words as far as I am concerned. Constructive criticism is obviously welcomed. I will have a look at all posts (hopefully many) in this thread and consider once I have seen everyone's views.

How you interpret this as "Roland did nok like to hear viewers' opinion" I don't understand. It is the opposite of what I wrote, what I told the unhappy ones, and what I think.

Roland

[Walddk]

Some statistics:

We broadcast 39 sessions with 10 or 8 tables per session. All 39 had English at 7/5 tables, 35 had Italian (1 table each), 28 had Chinese (1), 12 had Polish (1), 8 had Japanese (1), 6 had French (1), 4 had Indonesian (1), 3 had Turkish (1), 1 had Spanish (1), and 1 had Danish/Norwegian (1).

Roland

[vincenzo]

Often - Roland knows this - Italian Bridge Federation asks me to broadcast some events of italian team (it can be italian championship or some time european or world championship or other important competitions). I all these cases FIGB asks to have the possibility to manage one room. So what happens in these case is that one room is just with italian commentators and other room is just in english language.

This has happened at the beginning some years ago when I have started to make a "strong cooperation" between BBO and Italian Bridge Federation - starting from Vugraph - and hoping to extend it in all other bbo fields (tourneys, teaching ecc...).
(If I remember first happening has been first European Cup that took place in Rome some years ago won by Angelini's team: Lauria-Versace and Nunes-Fantoni)

Vincenzo

[peachy]

Walddk, on Oct 19 2008, 11:33 AM, said:

peachy, on Oct 19 2008, 04:42 PM, said:

Roland did not like to hear viewers' opinion on this and it is his privilege to feel that way.  But how else is he going to find out what viewers' preferences are if the viewers should stop sending him chat or e-mail about their preferences?  Assumedly public service still aims at serving the public and if the public has preferences, what is wrong with listening to them?

You must have misunderstood. I do indeed want to listen and I take complaints seriously. If my wish was to dictate everything, there would have been no need to raise the topic in Forums. This is what I wrote in my initial post:

Tolerance and understanding are the key words as far as I am concerned. Constructive criticism is obviously welcomed. I will have a look at all posts (hopefully many) in this thread and consider once I have seen everyone's views.

How you interpret this as "Roland did nok like to hear viewers' opinion" I don't understand. It is the opposite of what I wrote, what I told the unhappy ones, and what I think.

Roland

I was one who ventured to suggest in private chat to Roland that when a world top pair is playing, it would be nice to have English commentary at the table. Your private response to me was something like "What about the 500 Polish kibitzers?" with an addition of something like "You English speaking people have too little understanding of people who speak other languages". I don't remember this verbatim so if I have misunderstood your meaning, forgive me, but it came across to me that you thought I was being selfish or something. Which led me to believe that you did not want to hear that suggestion. Happy to have been shown that I got the wrong impression.

[geller]

As Roland pointed out upthread the arrangements work like this. The night before a match the federation providing the foreign language commentary is told to assign commentators to the closed room, and the English language commentators are assigned to the open room.

The lineups are decided by the teams only a few minutes before game time.

It would be theoretically possible to switch rooms at the last minute based on the lineups, but there would inevitably be people who failed to get the word and started commenting in the wrong room (this could eventually be straightened out of course....). But the present system seems much simpler.

The ultimate solution is multiple language channels, but till that time the present arrangments seem best.

As far as listening to people's opinions there is a limit, as everyone will want as much commentary as possible in a language (or languages) that he understands. So just taking a majority vote would mean all commentary would be in the most popular language(s) of the site, so compromise seems inevitable here.

-Bob

[jikl]

I have what may be a very silly suggestion, but it is one that has not been offered before.

Is there any reason a VuGraph signal can't be mirrored or sent twice? Let's pretend we have lots of commentators before that argument is proffered. The final is USA v China. Why can't the Vugraph feed from both the open and closed room be mirrored from the send, creating 4 rooms in the VuGraph theatre, Open: English and Chinese (well one of the Chinese languages), and Closed with the same options? In a match between Italy and Poland, (with the commentators available), why not 6 rooms (Italian, Polish and English)? This would be a way to do it before we have multi-channel functionality. It all comes down to whether there is an easy way for one vugraph entry to be able to be sent to 2+ tables at once which, in my mind, should be doable. The questions are basically, is it doable? Is it easy to do as a quick fix before true multi-channel functionality? And will we ever have enough commentators for something such as this?

Sean

[nikos59]

Walddk, on Oct 18 2008, 09:38 PM, said:

TimG, on Oct 18 2008, 05:11 PM, said:

Individuals should be able to buy the feed from BBO and set up their own pay-per-view vugraph show!

Suggestions as to how it should be in the future are excellent but not really relevant. This is not going to happen any time soon according to Fred. It would be more interesting to hear what can/should be done as it is now.

Tim did contribute, but most people did not. They are virtually all English speaking and perhaps can't see the problem. I realise that we won't get the views of the Poles, Turks, Chinese and Italians, but one could still voice one's opinion as to whether one should show consideration towards those groups or not.

Or should they just learn English and make it a non-issue? Or to turn it around: should people from English speaking countries learn other languages? Just the basic stuff in order to get the gist of the commentary in a foreign language.

Provocative perhaps, but isn't it a fact the we speak too few languages?

Roland

There is another angle. Not only there are many Italians-Frenchmen-Poles-etc. who can't grasp much of the English commentary, but the majority of non-English-speaking commentators are obviously expressing themselves much more richly in their maternal language. I, for one, find quite refreshing to watch the French or Italian commentary; moreover, the fact that commentators are more or less known to spectators and that they are rooting for their team adds spice. Even when Italy played England in the final, the English commentary in closed room was more or less impartial, while the Italian commentary in open room wasn't so -and I liked it, because it made for a more thrilling spectacle -mind you, I was a disinterested spectator, not rooting for any team.

[HedyG]

how come i don't see any posts by Italian spectators complaining that Versace/Lauria were playing at a table with English commentary?(just an example)
it seems to me that Roland goes out of his way to provide English language commentary in all matches. even when for example Italy is playing against China.thus to the disadvantage of the Chinese viewers(just another example)
those complaining about not having English commentary at all tables remind me of some spectators who , when watching a match in the main club on BBO complain about some of the specs comments in a language other than English...........
come on folks, try to be more tolerant and generous!

[Walddk]

HedyG, on Oct 21 2008, 02:31 PM, said:

how come i don't see any posts by Italian spectators complaining that Versace/Lauria were playing at a table with English commentary?(just an example)
it seems to me that Roland goes out of his way to provide English language commentary in all matches.

I don't go out of my way, because as stated a couple of times we will not have a match without English commentary. When it comes to an encounter between Italy and China, you are correct when you write that we must disappoint either the Italians or the Chinese. Local supporters seem to take it in their stride when they lose the toss.

Moreover, although we had Polish commentary in a segment where Meckstroth-Rodwell were playing, we added Walter Johnson (bigtrain) to the team. As you probably know, Walter is our expert on the Meckwell Precision Club, and all his explanations were put forward in English.

Similarly, we had Federico Primavera of Italy to guide us through many of the difficult sequences delivered by Lauria-Versace. Not least their version of Gazzilli and the subsequent auction.

Roland

[Gerben42]

I think providing commentary in different languages is an excellent service and should be continued.

Having two languages in one room is just... impossible I think. It's not fun to watch and will be confusing.