[thegeek]

Good to see possibly for the first time ever viewers relying on signing will have a choice of coverage.  Interesting to the Audio Description is on ITV1 as when C4 have done it previously for the Paralympics they've done it on a different channel as they said they couldn't mix the main commentary with the AD commentary, although I guess technically it's not much different to have an English / Welsh feed.

It’s exactly like having an English feed and a Welsh feed. Austria does it for Eurovision - viewers get the option of listening to the TV commentary or the radio commentary.

it's not exactly like that. Viewers who rely on AD expect it to always be available in the same way - ie as a feature they can enable in the menus on their STB or TV. This is particularly important for blind or partially sighted people who might have to have someone else set it up for them.

I know there are other ways to deliver alternate audios - for example, the DVB spec allows for different language soundtracks (which again, you'd access through menus in your STB), but I'm not aware of any UK broadcaster using these, and they probably don't have an easy method to transmit audio that way.

The BBC (and S4C?) have used a red button MHEG/OpenTV selector for alternate commentaries, which certainly used to boot you off into an SD red button stream. I don't think ITV have ever done this before though.

Maybe they do have something up their sleeves, but as Brekkie said above, anyone who's previously done live AD has had to use another channel for it. None of this should detract from the fact that they're making the effort in the first place however - I'm pleased to see more broadcasters recognising its importance.