20 Minutes Into The Future, Indeed

It’s taken more like 20 years, but I think we are nearly there. No, not the talking artificial human Max Headroom, but the cheap and cheerful Bigtime TV.

We now (nearly) have the technology to distribute… erm, crap TV bypassing the existing broadcast networks, hurrah! It all started with audio using (alright, first with audioblogs) Podcasting, but we much prefer video as a medium. Why? Well, after having an early play with the Podcasting scene back in October and even getting on the telly***** for my troubles, it became fairly clear that the quality level of most podcasts was scraping new, untapped lows. Simple reasons for this: quality of broadcasting talent, quality of content and no robust mechanism to find what you might like******. Audio is also very real-time and difficult to skim, search or preview (which is why audio blogs are in this bloggers opinion, a dead end). So why do we like the imminent dawn of the Vidicast***? One, it doesn’t have to run quite as linearly as audio (real-time). Two, the distribution technology is here, and RSS readers are beginning to support video formats in enclosures now. Three, the ultra efficient h.264 video compression technology is about to go super-mainstream. Four, and our favourite, the barriers to entry for video are *much* higher, so hopefully much of the bad radio swamping Podcasting can be kept at bay for a while until we solve the recommendation problem. Anyway, let’s see what happens. We’re ready: dodgy 80’s music videos lined up - check! Hacked together media acquisition and distribution center - check! Wobbly logo - check! ***** Culture Show, BBC2 for approximately 10 seconds. 14 mins, 50 secs left then. ****** This will no doubt be solved, the theory is all there, the bits need gluing together to resemble a massive online TiVo. *** Until someone comes up with a snappy title like Podcast, I’ll be using this. Vidicast well my brothers. Arf!