The automatic monitoring of broadcast programmes

The paper describes apparatus by means of which the British Broadcasting Corporation hopes to release for other services personnel who have been employed in keeping a listening check on the technical quality of its programmes. The apparatus performs its task not by judging from an absolute basis¿as has so often been done by the staff employed for this purpose¿but by comparing the content of the programme at a point where it has already been checked with that at a more distant point. Where it is impracticable to return the programme to the same point for checking purposes, it is synthesized into a band of information in which the factors to be judged are specially emphasized. The narrow band is transmitted for checking purposes over any convenient channel that can be derived from existing circuits.