www.devco.net by r.i.pienaar

Podcasts and Video Podcasts

Podcasting is all the rage these days and I can see why, there are some really good stuff out there, at the moment I really enjoy the Ricky Gervais podcast. Mostly its 3 guys talking absolute bollocks while being pretty funny about it, incredibly mindless fun.
On the video casting side there isn't as much that I enjoy though I've only really checked into 4 or 5 shows. Now everyone seems to think that this is the future of entertainment, independent guys making tv shows or radio shows bypassing all the networks, syndicates and all that crap. I can see the value in that argument as well and for most of the videocasts this holds true, short, focussed niche type shows that you either enjoy or don't and it's very easy to just move on to the next thing.
One show though stands out to me in it's incredible level of annoyance and outright insulting of its viewer base and that is the Photoshop TV show. Now this show has received a lot of raves in the past and this is the 2nd time I tried to watch it. The Photoshop related content is great, the tutorials are at many levels from beginner to advanced and the guys know their stuff, they're a bit keyboard shortcut happy which makes it hard for people to know how what they are doing relates to the tons of Photoshop menus but that not the end of the world.
So what's the problem? Like all of the podcast world they obviously have massive bandwidth bills to pay and they do this by promoting a number of sponsors, nothing wrong with that at all. The problem though is that the signal/noise ratio of the show is off the scales. As a little investigation I took their latest show and cut out all the advertising related content but leaving their inane chatter in. I was left with 2/3 of the 30 minute show. Cut out the chatter, startup jingle, ending jingle, competitions etc and you end up with less than 1/2 of the 30 minutes.
Apart from the signal/noise ratio they are obviously trying hard to look professional in the editing together of the show, things flow nicely into each other and so forth. Problem again is that the continuity of the thing is just crap. Person A hands Person B a PowerBook to do a Demo on, screen movie shows a XP box. Person B is done with the presentation and he is stood with a Windows Laptop in-front of him. Why? Why do they need to go and do silly things like that just put the box you're going to use in-front of you and get it over with, don't show of Apple kit cos it's sexy or is this just another product placement deal?
Each week they give viewers some kind of homework assignment to review websites etc, well this week there were 3 websites - one from each presenter. The 2nd recommended website was from a training center where the person recommending it is teaching a class. The 3rd one was a recommendation of the website for one of their sponsors! Immediately followed by a ad for the particular sponsor as well. During the show the one guy was constantly pushing a book he wrote, giving copies away telling you to buy it, where to buy it etc. Shameless self promotion.
So I left a quick comment on their blog, something along the lines of:

The photoshop content of the show is great, pity its spoiled by the 1/3 advertising content, not even the worst of TV shows are that bad with advertising.

Naturally they didn't approve my comment and it never showed up, nice one. I'd love to see how far television would get if for a hour show you end up with this level of absolute noise? The slashdot/digg crowd always go on a total freak out about the likes of Tivo moving towards not letting them skip over ads but then they stand for much worse from this grass roots tech that is supposed to save the video/audio entertainment world? I'm not sold.