iPlayer Pick: 20 January

Inspired by the brilliant Watchification, the Telegraph iPlayer Pick of the Day and the Radio Times Downloads index I’ve decided to post my own iPlayer picks.

I don’t really get to watch much in the way of linear television to be honest – I’m either reading a book, catching up on DVDs, listening to audiobooks & podcasts or reading/writing blogs.

So the iPlayer is my saviour – that and (when it works) ITV Player. It is how I watch more or less ALL of my television. Sometimes I find shows I want to watch by catching the end or half of them in the kitchen while eating dinner – something I find them on iPlayer itself and other times I find them through the pick links I posted above.

So I’m posting my first pick link for you – I caught half of this yesterday while eating dinner and watched the rest over lunch today on the iPlayer.

It is the Panorama special on the USA health care system. I really enjoyed Michael Moore‘s Sicko but it was a little (ok a lot) one sided. A great piece of entertainment and a good piece of journalism when preeching to the choir BUT lacking slightly in balance.

This piece from the BBC at least tries to look at both sides of the story.

You can watch it on the iPlayer HERE.

Barack Obama takes over as US President with a promise to dramatically change America and make it a fairer place. He is inheriting the worst economic crisis in almost a century, and a country so unequal that 23,000 people die every year because they cannot afford basic healthcare.

To close the gap between rich and poor Obama will have to take on the might of the corporate world, which wields enormous influence in Washington. Can he change the world’s most powerful country, and should he?

Embed code generated using my PIP code tool – probably won’t work as it was a quick and dirty bit of code to make my life a little easier.

This service may also fail at any moment due to code changes on the BBC iPlayer site.

Speaking of technology, social media and the BBC – Panorama is actually a pretty good example of how to do it.

The age old, but ever brilliant BBC documentary strand – now presented by the tall one himself, Jeremy Vine, has blogs from its reporters, makes use of Twitter and of Delicious.

You can watch parts of or the whole of each weeks show and every show is available on the iPlayer for a year – unlike the seven days other shows are up for.

The only problem with the Panorama use of Delicious is that they use it to link to themselves and their own stories instead of the better use of linking to ideas and research.

What I’d like to see is for them to set a date/show title tag and then post delicious links to the google searches researchers made while working on the story, links to websites of organisations mentioned in the story etc…

It would be nice to see them reply more on Twitter as well. Instead of using it to say ‘look this is what we’re doing’ they should be engaging in conversation, speaking to their followers and generally making the story a discussion instead of just using Twitter (a social network) as a place to sell their wares.

But that’s another post altogether – in fact one created already by the BBC Internet Blog.

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