ABC’s foray into Video podcasts
I’m a big fan of The Chaser teams’ productions on ABC (the Australian national broadcaster), such as CNNN (sic), The Election Chaser, and most recently The Chaser’s War on Everything. For unfathomable reasons, the show gets scheduled at around 9:45pm on a Friday night, so I was pretty happy to hear that it was available via Video Podcast.
While being a big fan of standard, audio-only podcasts, I hadn’t played with Video Podcasts before. So, I updated my iTunes to the latest version, navigated to the relevant feed and clicked “subscribe”. My PC started downloading the latest episode (around 75 Mb) and shortly after, I was watching it. Better still, my PC will automatically keep an eye on the feed, and pull down the new episodes as they occur. If only I had a video iPod…ahh well, watching it on the PC monitor was fine 
My initial reaction to all this (apart from “Yippee!”) was surprise - its not like a broadcaster to give away this stuff for free, right? Well, on reflection it makes sense. As the national broadcaster, ABC isn’t out to make cash from its products - its out to provide its material to the Australian public. Traditionally thats been done over the airwaves, but why not over the Internet?
I hope the ABC has worked out a process of integrating these download figures into their ratings numbers. And I’d be very curious to see the figures of how many people are downloading the podcast of this show - perhaps it wont be too long before this will be the new standard of broadcasting