The Jason Salas Experience

Looks like I've got some slight tweaking to do with my plans for developing my station's broadband channel service. Steve Rubel notes that a handful of ABC affiliates in major markets have started vidcasting their stories, headlines and newscasts and listing them as free MP4 downloads in the iTunes Music Store. This is an interesting shift, because most affiliate stations (mine included) typically have had such content available as streaming video, which can't be saved to a PC's filesystem, and doesn't have the subscribe/notify/auto-download benefits of RSS-based podcasting.

Many do this because the read-only nature of streaming technology prohibits such downloadingof permanent hard copies of the cast, keeping intact the profits generated by selling copies of broadcasts. Maybe this will calm the waters of ABC affiliates freaking out over network TV shows being available in ITMS.

I was thinking about doing this with our newscasts, perhaps creating an enhanced podcast for video, implementing Apple's proprietary RSS tagset to do things like chapterizing and embedding time-synched hyperlinks within iTunes. This would allow a user to be able to move to a specific story within a newscast, and jump to that story's written article on the Web, respectively.