Today was meant to be launch day for my latest, and I’d say my greatest, piece of work since going solo. But with a new server arriving late, our live date has slipped past Christmas. Of course it’s the only sensible thing to do; nobody would launch anything dramatic a week before the week-long shutdown, would they?
Step forward my old mates at Sky News, who have unveiled their new Sky News Video Player – actually, more of a dashboard, if you ask me. Video was the big improvement when Sky relaunched back in April, and this takes it to the next level. You get a split-screen view with a large playback window, and an overview of all current clips, which you can arrange in a personal playlist. Then hit the huge ‘play’ button (and probably ‘fullscreen’), sit back, and enjoy. There’s even a YouTube-style option to ’embed’ each individual clip in your own page (although WordPress doesn’t seem to want to let me use it?); click on MENU to find it. Part Flash, part HTML, a bit of Ajax too. All in all, a truly, truly brilliant execution, now some way ahead of the direct competition.
(Nice touch to do the Scoble-style amateur camerawork on executive producer Julian March’s walkthrough, too.)
They’ve also added the ability for people to comment at the bottom of individual news stories: see this example on an Amy Winehouse story. I’m not sure how much use people will make of this; the implementation’s a bit patchy; and to be honest, you have to look quite hard to find a story it’s been enabled on. But I suppose it’s early days.