Somebody at the BBC gets the idea of making the most of niche content – they’ve announced plans to put 81 years of classic British television online:

Spanning 81 years of radio and television, the project will create a web page for every episode of every single programme ever broadcast on the BBC, and be the basis of a future plan to introduce a searchable vault of archived shows.

It will bring information on every BBC programme ever shown, with clips, links and, eventually, whole programmes available either via the seven-day catch up service iPlayer, or commercial online video featuring Kangaroo, an on-demand service being developed with ITV and Channel 4, or a new online archive.

“Eventually we will add our programme back catalogue to produce pages for programming stretching back over nearly 80 years – featuring all the information we have on the richest TV and radio archive in the world,” said Bennett. “The BBC is committed to releasing the public value in that archive.”

This has the potential to dramatically change the television landscape.

If the BBC puts 81 years of television online, others will follow, creating a mass of Internet video unlike anything the world has ever seen. 

This is also likely to lead to changes in content production & distribution around the world. For example – if we can get 81 years of BBC TV online, will anybody want to watch a limited subset of this through US public television?

Disney announced today that for the first time, the company will stream its full-length movies online.

The films will first air on ABC as part of the network’s weekly Wonderful World of Disney presentation on Saturday nights throughout summer 2008. The full-length films will then be available for free streaming online for the following week.

Here’s what they’ve lined up for their initial schedule of Internet movies:

NewTeeVee has introduced a new site and video podcast, NewTeeVee Station, that offers their take on the best in Internet television.

According to Om Malik’s announcement, the site:

• Features editorial reviews of online videos written by a team lead by Liz Shannon Miller, who comes to us from Variety and the Daily Reel.
• Has over 100 NTV shows & videos as part of the launch effort alone.
• Sports a database of cast, crew and other details to map out the expanding web video universe.
• Invites readers to become part of the editorial process by adding their own reviews, comments and ratings.
• Boasts eight channels of the most memorable comedy, commercials, drama, music, news & talk, personalities, reality and zeitgeist picks.
• Showcases what’s hot at that moment, right on the front page.

You can also subscribe to the site, using this feed URL:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/newteevee/station

A Florida judge has ordered two teenage boys who used the site for a prank to create a video apology for their mischief and to post it on YouTube:

The prank, known as “fire in the hole,” has become common in the past year. It happened July 25 to fast-food worker Jessica Ceponis at the drive-through of the Taco Bell in Merritt Island, about 50 miles east of Orlando.

Ceponis handed a carload of teens their soft drinks. When she returned to the drive-through window to give them their change, they yelled, “Fire in the hole!” hurled a 32-oz. cup of soda and ice at Ceponis and sped off.

The teens posted a video of the incident on YouTube.com, alongside a number of other videos showing similar pranks. Today, the teens are scheduled to post another video on YouTube: an apology that shows them face down and handcuffed on the hood of a car.

The judge, prosecutor and defense attorneys who devised this punishment hope it will serve as a deterrent.

Yesterday’s Steve Jobs keynote was a bust: he announced what people already knew he was going to announce, but little more.

And the only real surprise was that Apple’s iPhone “price cut” was really a price hike, buried in your monthly AT&T bill.

The biggest surprise of the day turned out to be that Twitter actually stayed up. There was a healthy conversation going on throughout the keynote, and though I noticed some delays, it seemed to stay up for the duration.

“We made it,” notes Twitter:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart & The Colbert Report are among the two latest additions to Hulu’s offerings.

This could take Hulu’s traffic to another level, given the two shows’ popularity and late-night time slots.

We’d still like to see Hulu fix its ad targeting and for it to work with set-top boxes to expand its reach beyond the computer screen, but Hulu is rapidly becoming the YouTube of longer videos.

Both shows are embeddable:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart:

The Colbert Report

Update: The news is already generating a lot of buzz.

The Apple Keynotes podcast offers video of the company’s most important announcements, including CEO Steve Jobs keynotes.

It hasn’t been updated with today’s keynote yet, but it has the last two Macworld keynotes & the March 6 iPhone Software Roadmap event.

Microsoft today announced the release of the Podcasting Kit for SharePoint (PKS), a free, open source podcasting kit that offers organizations a centralized solution to create, manage and distribute podcasts.

Built on the SharePoint Server and Microsoft Silverlight platforms, and compatible with the Zune, PCs and other devices that play podcasts (ie., iPods & iPhones), the PKS provides a medium to record and distribute video and audio information via the Internet and intranet.

Apple today killed off its much-maligned .Mac service and introduced MobileMe, a service that delivers push email, push contacts and push calendars from the MobileMe service in the cloud to native applications on iPhone, iPod touch, Macs and PCs.

In a nutshell, your apps will automatically get synced, via MobileMe, so that your desktop, laptop, iPhone & web calendar are current.

MobileMe also provides a suite of web applications that deliver a desktop-like experience through any modern browser. MobileMe applications will include Mail, Contacts and Calendar, as well as Gallery for viewing and sharing photos and iDisk for storing and exchanging documents online.

The base service is $99/year for 20GB, or $150 for a family. Additional storage can be purchased for $99/40GB.

We would have like to have seen larger storage options and support for Time Machine backups to MobileMe. Google currently offers storage plans up to 400GB, and their pricing is significantly lower, too.

Apple today updated the iPhone, introducing the iPhone 3G.

The iPhone 3G is an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary update. The phone’s network speed is about twice as fast, at least where AT&T has coverage, and Apple has added GPS positioning. Apple has also added Exchange support, to attract business users.

On the downside, Apple has effectively raised the price on the base model and didn’t add many hoped-for features, like video capabilities, larger memory or a higher-quality camera. The new iPhone is also slightly larger, so it’s incompatible with many accessories, and uses more plastic in its construction.

Last year, we identified 5 Things Apple Needs To Do To Fix The iPhone.

Did they fix them? Let’s take a look: