Very cool new project coming up for PBS’ Cringely with NerdTV. He gives some details in his column. It’s a new techy show, distributed on the web under a Creative Commons licence so you can reuse it for non-commercial purposes. It will also be available in a couple of different versions and in audio only formats. Looking forward to it.
NerdTV is pretty much as I described it back in 2002: a downloadable video show that features long-form interviews with notable nerds. I was definitely ahead of the curve with that download feature. What has changed about the show is just the episode length, which is now about an hour up from 20 or so minutes, and the bandwidth required, now 183 kilobits-per-second up from 128. Pilot after pilot showed that 20 minutes simply wasn’t enough time while an hour feels about right. And the extra bandwidth was always needed for the 320-by-240 video window, only now it is finally cheap enough that I can afford it.
But NerdTV isn’t really podcasting, is it? Well, we’ll be doing that, too. It requires almost no effort at all to offer audio-only feeds of NerdTV shows, so we’ll be doing those in AAC, MP3, and ogg vorbis formats, again starting September 6th.