A new way to watch the telly

The experiment that produced Speechification – which is a sort of diagonal slice through the output of Radio 4 and various other speech radio stations delivered as a podcast – has brought forth Watchification!

At Watchification, Russell, Roo and myself, plus a small army of contributors (including my wife, who is, like, a real TV critic), are making regular selections from the BBC’s new streaming iPlayer. By the wonders of ’embedding’ you can watch the video right there at Watchification, without having to beetle off back to the Beeb.

This is a bit of a breakthrough, since it allows us to ‘curate’ the BBC’s broadcast content in a way that’s never been possible before – and certainly not with the non-streaming, Windows-only iPlayer that launched at Xmas. It’s like a ‘best of’ for your telly. What I find exciting about it is that we’re playing with proper, grown-up media and making a contribution that feels like it might be the beginning of something: a new kind of television ecology that’s more distributed and less monolothic.

So tune in daily, subscribe to the feed (when we switch it on), follow us on Twitter and tell your friends.