Just thought I'd let you all know my experiences of using BB's internet streaming this year.......and it's not looking good!

1) Same Audio feed as E4 - This is really annoying. One of the best things about the internet feeds in previous years was the inclusion of bad language etc during the day. I'm not desparate to here them swear, but it at least cuts down on the constant cuts to "birds chirpping".

2) Streams A & B Same audio - It appears (so far as I keep checkling, but I can't be sure on this yet) that there's only 1 audio feed no matter which Stream you're looking at. This means if two sets of conversations are going on you can look at either, but only listen to one.

3) Fairly stable service. Seems the same as last year in that it drops occasionally (every 5 or 10 mins), but only for a few seconds.

4) Behind E4 - Seems to be up to a couple of minutes BEHIND the E4 footage.

The only decent advantage over E4 is no ads and no txt ticker (this thing is REALLY annoying!), but it amazes me how the Live service just gets worse every year. I thought we may have got to see 3 or 4 feeds this year, but no. C4 and Endomol are still quite happy to charge for a lousy service. Oh and one last thing - I emailed my comments to the official address, plus the bblb address, and the help address - all advertised on the official site and guess what? bblb didn't reply and the other two addresses bounced back saying:

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This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.

Delivery to the following recipients failed.

theeditor@bigbrother.endemoluk.com

Reporting-MTA: dns;MAIL.bigbrother.endemoluk.com
Received-From-MTA: dns;mail19.messagelabs.com
Arrival-Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 09:04:21 +0100
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So they're obviously putting interaction very high on their priority list if their e-mail addresses don't even work!

Cheers,
UC

I emailed my comments to Ch4 about their interactive and I got this receipt back: -

Your message

To: Mobile Services
Subject: E4 Text Banner on Big Brother
Sent: Sun, 25 May 2003 15:07:27 -0000

was deleted without being read on Tue, 27 May 2003 15:13:48 -0000

Seems Channel 4 don't care about the views of us Big Brother fans

Typical!!
I have tried several times to access the live streams and NOTHING.

Does it work at all??

I complained to about 20 official addresses last year to moan about the charge to watch the BB stream and I got exactly the same response as you.

Considering the idea of BB was conceived from the internet it is surprising that they pay less homage to it. With the advent of broadband I'm further surprised that the service is less than superb.

I did read that less than 50,000 subscribers took the RealOne Pass last year which to me doesn't sound like many. What impetus do BB have of providing a great service.