Interesting Stuff 2008-08-26

Broadcast, Broadband TV News, Digital Spy and sundry blogs report Simon Nelson's announcement of "series stacking" on BBC iPlayer (of no more than 15% of all television content [explanation from the BBC Trust]; series to include Merlin, Tess Of The D'Urbervilles, Little Dorrit, Survivors, The History Of Climate Change, Bruce Parry's Amazon, Clone, Walking With Beeching and The Story Of Maths):

Now, you'll be able to join a series half way through following a friend's recommendation and catch up on all the previous episodes - or watch them all in one go over a weekend.
Series stacking marks a key development in our strategy to let audiences view our programmes whenever and wherever they want.

Simon is also quoted in this release about adding BBC Four, CBBC and CBeebies to the official live streams offered for BBC Three, the BBC News Channel and BBC Radio, as reported by Oliver Luft in The Guardian.

"The BBC faces strike action at its research and development centre at Kingswood Warren", reports Media Guardian.

There's been a lot of response to the post here by iPlayer chief Anthony Rose, BBC iPlayer Goes H.264. Dan Rayburn of StreamingMedia blogs about inaccuracies in the coverage:

Bottom line, journalists need to do a much better job of fact checking and not run a story just for the headline or because they feel since other bloggers ran it, they have to also.

So who's been saying what, aside from The Register and Slashdot? There's some speculation about the BBC and ISPs with eye-catching images [click on the thumbnail for more] at Telco 2.0, and a response from Internet Blog's editor Nick Reynolds on his personal blog.

"Despite Team GB's massive medal haul," reckons WebUser magazine, "it is the BBC's website that is the star of the Beijing Olympics." All the details are in John O'Donovan's post below.

Over at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh TV Festival, Ashley Highfield, formerly of this parish, has been talking about what Video On Demand means for multichannel TV, and those of us not in Auld Reekie can watch sessions including the Public Service Broadcasting Review, Armando Iannucci's call for the BBC to go HBO and Peter Fincham's MacTaggart Lecture. [Apologies for the lack of direct links to the video - the site doesn't work that way and instead offers you .FLV files to save - clearly this online video malarkey is never going to catch on!]

And from Beeboid bloggers, the new "Portfolio Executive, Social Media - BBC Vision", Roo Reynolds, blogs his first week and BBC Jersey's Ryan Morrison is Thinking About A Future BBC.

Alan Connor is co-editor, BBC Internet Blog.