WordblogJournalism in a changing world

The BBC is trying out embedded Flash video on its news site and a very welcome development it is. One of the items is a report on a Gloucestershire family that tried out all the latest new media gizmos but decided they would wait until there was better content.

Alfred Hermida who was involved in setting up the BBC site in 1997 hails it as a huge improvement over the current streaming technology used by the BBC, but has doubts about embedding video in the text story.

Personally I prefer it to the clunky pop-up player which has caused me constant problems. There are a benefits from being able to refer to text at the same time as a video (or audio, for that matter) is playing.

While the BBC is likely to provide packages from its broadcast services, there is a lot of work still to be done on finding ways in which text, video and audio can work together to tell the story better.