Recently I have found myself drawn into what seems to be the latest craze in technology; the ability to retrieve audio and video content straight from the internet. While this sounds like something that we have had for a while now I am referring to two specific aspects of this, Podcasts and IPTV.
Podcast is just a tech term for basically radio shows (though most are just normal people recording shows on their computers, think pirate radio) that can be subscribed to and a program on your PC retrieves them for you as new programs you subscribe to are released. The term itself is a reference to the Apple iPod MP3 player but any mp3 player will work. You can also burn the files to CD and listen in a regular CD player which is the method I am using until I can get some problems with the input into my car radio worked out. Some of the shows I listen to are This Week in Tech (
http://twit.tv), a technology discussion show, and Dragonpage (
http://www.dragonpage.com), a fantasy literature discussion show. The best way to subscribe to podcasts is to use a program such as ipodder though Apple has just released a new version of their itunes program that may be more user friendly for nontechnical users (
http://www.itunes.com). I also want to mention another awesome type of podcast; audio books. These audio books are audio books that you can subscribe to and every week a the next chapter of the book is pulled down to your PC. You can find some of these books at
http://podiobooks.com. Hopefully more content will be made available in this format.
IPTV is an even cooler technology in my opinion. Basically you have people recording shows and making them available for download on the internet. Some great examples of this are Systm (
http://systm.org), CommandN (
http://www.commandn.tv), and From the Shadows (
http://fromtheshadows.tv). While all of these shows are technology related I believe that there is a lot of potential in this technology for other types of shows to be made available in the future. This is especially true for shows that major networks seem to be avoiding (I will avoid the inevitable rant on "reality TV"... Anyway, check out both of these technologies, I am sure you will find something that you like.
