Interesting Stuff 2008-05-22

Ashley Highfield was part of a panel discussion on "The Future of Online Video" at Google Zeitgeist earlier this week. A video of the discussion has now been posted on YouTube:

"Boys and girls stay in to play on BBC's virtual island Adventure Rock": a feature in The Times.

"BBC's Today Programme shutters message board" claims The Register.

Multimedia codecs are highly proprietary and suffer from serious patent-encumbrance issues that largely preclude open source implementations. Car manufacturers will still have to license those codecs from third parties in order to support the audio and video formats that are widely used by consumers. Major players in the automotive industry could potentially combat this issue by encouraging the content industry to move towards unencumbered codecs like BBC's Dirac

[I think I understand this one -Ed] from an ars technica article about computers in cars ("Intel wants to pimp your ride with prodigious penguin power").

"BBC iPlayer use grew 22% in April" from Digital Spy. Broadcast magazine has a list of the top twenty most watched iPlayer programmes in April.

And there's lots of blogs talking about the BBC's Sound Index and a discussion on the Backstage mailing list.

Nick Reynolds is editor, BBC Internet blog.