Watching the remembrance “Parade” on tv this morning, I noticed that when Big Ben started to strike for 11-o-clock, the big hand wasn’t quite pointing straight up on the first bong.
Digital television, folks. H264 coders need to know the future as well as the past in order to detect motion and send vectors to the decoder. This adds a second or so delay . The Outside Broadcast vans convert to digital, bounce up to a geosynchronous satellite, back down, are mixed and re-encoded, then your TV reassembles frames of data sent in parallel which all arrive slowly at the same time, adding more delay. Plus on live broadcasts, the 5 second or so delay allows the broadcasters to shut the feed when some nutter fires up and starts shooting or shouting.. .
Which might explain why it was six seconds slow. But not why the bongs started before the minute hand was on 12.
The bongs aren’t real anymore. They had to take the bells out for health and safety reasons. They were melted down and used as vehicle barriers on Westminster bridge. Now the royal master of the clock simply climbs the stairs and plays a recording of an old grand father clock through a set of speakers. It keeps the tourists happy and saves a small fortune.
Talking of timekeeping, at work this week my DAB (get me) radio was 39 seconds ahead of the Alexa thingy. I felt like H G Wells going from one room to another.
Personally I’d like to see them get Gladys Pugh out of off of Hi-De-Hi to play her chime bars on the hour, every hour.
I sometimes listen to the football match on radio 5 live - and also have the commentary on the laptop which has the stats as well - there is a massive time lag on the laptop .
