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Comment by hccampos | Hacker News Reader

Live stream: http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/live/

I have been watching this (through their great Apple TV fourth gen app) for the past hour.

They have been excellent at doing live-translations of the primary NHK domestic broadcast. About 45 minutes ago the tone of the japanese language speaker in the background was really, really emotional, loud and fast. Reports of tsunami sightings at various distances from the seaside, factory fires etc were coming in by the minute.

They are warning people of returning to the seaside too early; now warning of a possible ~90 cm tsunami that might still be very strong.

Edit: Prime minister Abe made a brief, live speech to the nation.. and the NHK put him in a small picture-in-picture box in the lower left part of the screen so that they could still show the live view of the seaside. That was special.

Japan has been mastering the art of picture-in-picture boxes for the last 30 years of television.

I've read that NHK news presenters are also trained to use emotional language/tone in this kind of emergency, so that people would pay a better attention.

There was a significant revision of emergency response in Japan in the past five years.

In the U.S. news presenters use hyperbolic language and an upset tone about everything. I doubt the same technique would work here.

>In the U.S. news presenters use hyperbolic language and an upset tone about everything.

What? No they don't. You may be confusing news presenters with some parody of the same, or with people like Bill O'Reilly, who are not news presenters, but commentators.

American news presenters, like news presenters almost everywhere, are trained to avoid hyperbole and emotional tone. Although admittedly, the line between news and commentary is getting purposely blurred because news is boring and opinion is engaging.

Now North Korea - they do "hyperbolic language and an upset tone about everything."

I was also quite amazed to see that they have closed captions for the simultaneous translation of their live domestic broadcast. Besides the sheer logistics of it, I didn't even know that you could do that with HTML video.

It's an HLS video, which comes in the form of a text manifest file (.m3u8). The manifest file can define subtitle segments (.vtt, 608, 708) in addition to video segments (.ts) - it's the job of the video player to stitch these together to play at the same time. Safari & Edge have their own HLS implementations but every other browser uses a third party library. Server-side transcoding is responsible for making these manifest files from video & subtitle files.

Also, this video is in Flash

Interesting, thanks! I had a quick peek at the developer tools but didn't delve more deeply. I assume (from the fact that it was live TV) that all of this can be done just in time as well and that the stream of captions is sent along with the video stream.

> Also, this video is in Flash

Not for me. I was watching in Safari on my phone.

They're reporting a 3 meter tsunami is expected in Fukushima.

Was that Abe, I thought it was one of his cabinet ministers?

Oops, may have been. I wasn't paying full attention to the TV at the time, just heard the english translator say "something something prime minister Abe something live statement something something" and then saw a small box with a Japanese man of approximately the right age speaking.

I'm not sure if we're talking about the same broadcast, but Abe did briefly address the situation from Argentina.

Playable in VLC: http://web-cache.stream.ne.jp/www11/nhkworld-tv/222468/live_...

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