I just had a chance to read your piece on our launch of TDL - The Digital Lifestyle. Thanks for checking out the site. I think you did a great job of pointing out the potential audience our channel has, and I wanted to clarify (and agree!) with some of the issues you raise. First, we are not happy with the current video quality. Period. Essentially, what’s happening is everything needs to be in Flash for our player. We are using the Mogulus player because it quickly allows us to go live for breaking Apple stories (like MacWorld keynotes). All of the current, solutions for 24-hour streaming are flash-based. As you can guess, this means all the content needs to get compressed an additional time, in addition to the compression that has already taken place in the case of podcasts.

Our hope is that Adobe’s support of h.264 in Flash will allow us to natively show these files, which will greatly improve video quality. YouTube’s announcement that high quality clips are coming shortly will also boost a great deal of our content.

Speaking of content, there will be significantly more after this weekend. Since yesterday we have added an additional hour of clips, a new video podcast has been added to the lineup, and this weekend our third original show will go online. This is new territory in terms of how much content is enough. If there’s a four-hour blopck for example, do we completely swap it out daily? weekly? Do we mix in new clips with old? Do we adopt a radio station-like formula, and have certain “hot” clips in the rotation more frequently? These questions will all be answered in time. I would invite you to stop back in a month or so, and see if your thoughts on the content offerings have changed. Frankly, this launch hit bigger than intended, and so people are seeing things far more raw than planned.

Again though, thanks for checking out the site. I’d be happy to answer any questions, if you or your readers would like to send them this way.

~Ryan