Todd Biske: Outside the Box

There’s no shortage of webcasts these days. What’s frustrating for me, however, is that accessing them is still too inconvenient for me. It never fails that the one webcast I’m interested in will be scheduled at the same time as a meeting I have. I could have one meeting in the entire week, and it will coincide with the webcast.

If you’ve followed my blog, you also know that I’m an Apple fan, which means I have my share of iPods, including a Video iPod. Why aren’t companies leveraging video podcasts or vodcasts for delivery to consumers? While many webcasts are available on demand after the original presentation, they still tend to be streaming video, meaning I need to be connected to watch it. It would seem that someone could find a simple way to extract the appropriate marketing data when subscribing to an RSS feed so that could be captured when a particular vodcast was downloaded. Yes, iPods can only handle 640×400 now, but even that should be adequate. You can certainly send larger video if you want to view it in iTunes. Personally, I think trying to tailor slides so that they are visible on an iPod could be a good thing for presentations. It would avoid those text heavy slides that the presenter simply reads verbatim. So how about it vendors? Talk to your preferred webcast provider and start making things available in a downloadable H.264 format.

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