Sky News has jumped on the podcasting bandwagon, so far offering one weekly video download (the ‘7 Days’ roundup of ‘And Finally’ stories, as seen on Sky News Active) and one weekly audio download (an Adam Boulton audio column). It’s all a good start, and to be welcomed. But there are issues.
The ‘7 Days’ video is a whopping 60MB download for 12’23 of content in a relatively modest 320×235 resolution, even at a full 25 frames per second. And it’s a very odd choice to offer the file in M4V format: great for iPod owners, maybe – but hopeless for anyone else. As far as I can tell, you won’t be able to play M4V on Archos or Creative units. Most of the common PC desktop software players won’t like it either. The only one I’ve found which accepts M4V so far is VideoLAN… and how many people have even heard of it? (Thankfully, the audio file from Adam Boulton is in universal MP3 format.)
If it were up to me – and granted, it isn’t any more – I wouldn’t have gone live without having an alternative feed for a more common format. DivX AVI or WMV, probably. It can’t be any extra effort to encode the same source file a second time. I reckon I’d also have tried to cut the file size down a bit… if this is intended for iPod use (and in M4V, it must be), I doubt many people would notice if you cut the frame rate by half. 60MB is a hefty chunk of capacity to give to a single file. Sport needs full frame-rate, news doesn’t.
I was planning on saying something about the free (as in ‘no extra charge’) SkyByBroadband service, which also launched yesterday… but it still won’t let me register. Something seriously wrong with its password validation, I think.