Hey all, soon I will have collected all my research for the 3D video that I’ve been going on about for months, all of which founded on this report about Sky 3D. There was a thing on BBC Click this weekend about 3D that I should watch before I write up the review.

MSN and the BBC have teamed up (Bill Gates would be spinning in his Zune-shaped grave……..if he was dead) to give a “huge” online archive, powered by MSN Video (despite the awesomeness that is BBC iPlayer) that will provide classic and old episodes of TV shows, such as The League of Gentleman. It was launched yesterday and starts off with a less than bountiful array of TV gold, I imagine that’s because they’ve sold the rights to most of it to Dave (for those who don’t know, Dave is a tv channel in the UK which rebroadcasts old episodes of BBC drama, documentary and comedy). For example, the sci-fi section (which is the first real place anyone who’s tech-clued enough to have heard of it will go) has practically nothing that anyone would ever want to watch again in the history of anything ever. The only thing I’ve heard of on there is the Quatermass Experiment (the recent remake with David Tennant, hence I’ve heard of it) though there is some good bits of the comedy and drama section. Oddly enough, some of the shows available to watch are provided by BBC Worldwide (hence it’s old shows that nobody cares about the rights for anymore) but were broadcast in the UK on rival channels. Peep Show and How to make Gok Wan look good were both broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK, but then I don’t really know the legalities of it all so I guess that’s just how it goes.

Problem is the Channel 4 have had a service like this for years, aptly named 4od. Combine that with the fact that anything broadcast anywhere that’s vaguely worth watching again is uploaded to YouTube within seconds, most of the time by the broadcaster themselves, makes this whole thing an exercise in futility. Microsoft just turned off their video publishing platform Soapbox, so they haven’t proven at all that they can handle video sites, especially if they’re as poorly marketed as soapbox, Hulu (the US website providing video-on-demand to US citizens, and anyone with moderate computer skills globally) is planning to expand into the UK next month which will (hopefully) make up for the destruction of Project Kangaroo.

All in all, the cards are stacked almost entirely against Microsoft. If the British Broadcasters don’t join Hulu (which, judging by this move, the BBC might not) and if they market and publicise this service correctly AND if the BBC push hours and hours of content onto the service (which still remains unnamed except for MSN Video……catchy AND descriptive) immediately, they might survive. But I don’t foresee this as becoming in any way successful. If you want to check it out for yourself the address is: player.uk.msn.com.

Now I’m off to finish my 3D research and recover from the migraine it’s caused.

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