Now I want to be a TV producer!!!

I sat down with the guys in the office the other day to discuss getting a video clip of how to use a piece of software made and distributed from our systems and was struck by how easy it was to create video content. Lee hit the nail on the head when he said, “just film it on a digital camera, if the format does not work on one of our servers then we will upload it to YouTube and just link that to our web page”.

This got me thinking about where the whole media thing was going and trying to imagine how people would engage with this in the future. Already in my house we use Skype to keep in touch with friends who are in other countries or different parts of the UK, I have linked the TV with a web cam and PC so that if any of us want to talk to someone, it’s into the sitting room and on to the TV. If we wanted to we could save the conversation and play it back so that we did not miss anything or were able to pass elements onto friends.

So how are companies going to use visual media in the future? I was watching Virgin 1, and between the joys of watching Capt Sisko kicking the Founders out of Cardassia, one of the adverts was for Ocean Finance who have their own digital TV channel, crazy? A waste of time? I’m not so sure, with the ability to access content on demand and the change over to digital TV opening up unlimited channels, along with the cost of production dropping to allow any organisation to produce business centric content on their own digital TV channel, delivered over Freeview TV, the real question is why aren’t we all producing content this way.

Compared to the internet and its inefficient use of bandwidth by H 323 over the IP protocol when used for video streaming, Digital TV offers fantastic compression giving a significantly improved picture quality which, delivered over Freeview or subscriber TV, is a way of engaging with your customers that only large companies have been able to access through traditional advertising media. We have watched the growth of the viral add on the web and I would not be surprised that over the next few years we will see an expediential increase in business focused digital TV channels.

You think I am way off base? Early last year I was in serious discussions with a company to host equipment to deliver TV on demand to a government agency for training purposes. The company was already delivering the content via CD but saw this as a way to increase viewing and therefore income and of ensuring this content was not illegally copied. Not so crazy after all.

What caught my eye in Feb

I have got to admit that I have been glued to BBC TV over the last couple of weeks watching two programs in particular, the first will be no surprise to those who know me “Empire of the Seas” which is fascinating because it demonstrates how the growth of the Navy and the governments spending on its development underwrote the industrial revolution.

The other program, which I happened on by chance, was “The Virtual Revolution”, the eye opening account of the birth of the internet and the WWW along with its effects on us is one not to be missed whether you are a techie or not. Two things struck me in the program, the first is that the inventor of the world wide web did not create it until 1998, after I had left school, and the second is the Sir Tim Berners-Lee was not that much older than me!!

The program is a four part series and if you have missed any of it take advantage of a piece of technology born out of this live changing technology and down load it on BBC iPlayer, http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/ , the first episode was on Satuday 30th Jan, stream it to your digital TV over a wireless link to the TV’s media streamer and see it in high definition which will definitely enhance the musing shots of Dr Aleks Krotoski.

What! you mean you don’t play digital content off the web on your TV!!