Well, no, not really. But hit ‘play’ and keep watching.

This is a very clever piece of customised video. Makes me think that internet advertising will get an awful lot cleverer from hereon in.

(Reading via an RSS reader? Try this to watch.)

Thanks Sam Downie for pointing this out…

I’ve been wondering why I watch comparatively little video online. And I think I’ve hit on the answer.

From a recent blog from Robert Scoble:

What was really fun was having raclette cheese dinner with famous author Bruce Sterling. Of course I intruded on the dinner with my cell phone camera. It’s a 40 minute video … it doesn’t get interesting until about 13 minutes when Bruce tells us the difference between a blogger and a novelist.

I note Scoble’s joining Fast Company, which apparently (from their metadata) “covers the new economy and workplace for people who believe in fusing tough-minded performance with human values.” I hope one of the tough-minded performance issues that Scoble sorts is his expectation that people will willingly sit through 13 minutes of dull, badly-shot video before anything “interesting” happens.

He comes across on TWIT as a nice guy - but since he believes editing is just too-cool-for-school, I’m sure he won’t mind that I’ve just edited him out of my Google Reader list. I’d rather read stuff from people that respect my time, and yours.

Photo: Finn Pröpper. Used under licence.

In late November 2007, I was proud to chair Radio at The Edge, a really thought-provoking day around what new technology brings to radio.

As a scene-setter for a great panel session ably produced by one of my colleagues Alan Phillips, the above video was played - which demonstrates the tremendous strides we’ve made in the UK. Whether it’s as simple as “now-playing” information, click-to-buy, or some really interesting prototypes that the BBC has been working on in terms of visualising radio, this is a great video to watch.

As other radio commentators repeatedly say, radio must remain relevant to the audience of today and tomorrow. As a demonstration of the benefits of adding more information to radio broadcasting, it couldn’t be clearer. When radio and new platforms collide, great things happen. Watch it, share this with others, and enjoy.

My thanks, particularly, to Michael Gray, who’s Interactive Platform Producer in BBC Audio & Music Interactive’s Distribution Technologies team, for his excellent work; and I’m particularly pleased that this video shows off the strides that all the radio industry has made in the UK - especially my old team’s work at Virgin, the team at Unique Interactive, and GCap’s XFM.

UPDATE
As a piece of clarification for my overseas visitors, since this blog post is already getting plenty of hammer, it’s worth pointing out what are simply “ideas” right now, and what is launched:
- Now-playing info: live now on almost all DAB radio stations. (5m+ sets in the UK)
- Buy the songs you hear - Cliq live now on seven commercial radio brands
- BBC Radio 1’s TV visualisation: a prototype; a simpler version is live now on the Radio 1 website
- Listen-again: live now on all BBC and some commercial station websites
- Rewind live radio: available on a number of DAB sets now
- Record radio: available on a number of DAB sets now
- Radio electronic programme guide: live now on many stations; available on a number of DAB sets now
- Watch live sessions: live now on most major radio station websites
- Podcasts: live now on most major radio station websites
- DAB Digital Radio iPod plugin: two different makes instore now
- Downloadable videos: from some commercial radio stations
- Texting radio stations: live now on all stations
- Picture-messaging radio stations: live now on many stations
… i.e. everything you see is actually launched, and live. These aren’t purely ideas.

(I’ve posted this on my own blog without getting copyright clearances for the commercial music involved. I’d like to claim it’s fair use; but that’s why I’m a little concerned about sticking this into an official BBC Radio blog. I’m not posting this on behalf of the BBC, so if you’re Billy Idol and you’d rather I removed this, please do get in touch.)

There’s a well-worn cycle with tech toys.

- You think they’re bloody great for the first few days.
- You convince yourself that despite the drawbacks you’ve found with the product, it’s still a jolly good buy.
- A few weeks later, you discover the full potential of the device with some odd workarounds that take quite some time to do, but make your product do some really cool things.
- A week later, you work out how to automate most of the workaround, which makes you feel even cleverer.
- A few weeks later, you stop doing the ridiculous workarounds because they take far too long to wait for the automation to work.
- A month later, you consign the product to a drawer.
- Six months later, you discover the product again and get all excited.
- Six months and one day later, you realise exactly how much of a crock of shit it is, and throw it back in the drawer.
- A year later, you sell it on eBay for a fraction of the cost you initially spent.

This is generally my cycle.

I’ve spent probably many hundreds of pounds on tech toys that I thought would be great but the dim reality dawns once I play with them. Nevertheless, half the fun is hacking these tech toys to do what you want.

An Intel MP3 player, that required an arcane piece of software to be run every time I wanted to put some music on it, and for me to sit and wait as it slowly transferred over USB1. No podcasts at the time, but plenty of free content broadcast over the air on DAB Digital Radio, for which I had a computer-based tuner which allowed me to take the bitstream, then manually re-encode it into MP3 (since MP2 wasn’t supported), and then allowed me to manually copy it over.

A Compaq iPAQ, USB TV tuner, Sky+ and Windows Media Encoder combo that would, once I’d programmed it carefully using a DOS batch file and co-ordinated hitting buttons on the laptop and the Sky remote, record those programmes I’d flagged in Sky+, encode them into Windows Media format and copy them onto the SD card which I could then the next morning take and place into my iPAQ which would then allow me to watch the programme I’d recorded on the tube.

Similarly, a USB-based DAB tuner which I managed to get networked on a Bluetooth connection to my iPAQ, allowing me to listen to (and control) DAB Digital Radio in any room in the house. Before I realised that it was infinitely easier to get a DAB Digital Radio.

Anyway, this is an awfully long preamble to saying, quite simply, I’m only on the first point with my iPod Touch. I still think it’s bloody great.

Now, true - I’ve “jailbroken” it, so now I have a ton more applications on it. VNC allows me to control the machine over there that’s playing music. I also have the Mobile Mail application (and the maps application) which should be on the iPhone; and it works perfectly when it sees a wifi connection - checking and uploading my email automatically. The ‘terminal’ application, which allows a full Unix session, is pretty cool to show off with (though moderately useless otherwise).

But I’m using it as I did my iPod Nano - automatically filling it and training it to play me great music, as well as getting some great video podcasts, like the aforementioned Mahalo Daily (if I mention it again, maybe Jason Calcanis will pop back and make another nice comment), the slightly surreal Tiki Bar TV, and the always excellent Onion News Network, a delicious pastiche of network news.

It is also, as mentioned earlier, an excellent web tablet - not least because websites have done such a good job of reformatting their content to work with the device. From Facebook, to BBC News (they’ve done some nice tweaks recently, I note), to Google Reader - content owners are taking notice of this little device. (Visit this website on your iPod Touch or your iPhone and you’ll notice that I could hardly resist myself.)

If you’re looking for a good Christmas present - perhaps even for yourself - you can’t go far wrong.

Photo: my colleague Dan Taylor. Used under licence.