Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

Lately all the rage has been about the hot new thing for videobloggers. Jay has hyped it, and there is more coverage by Adrian and Steve. ANT is a specialised video feed reader for the Mac. It will read feeds and play any video marked as enclosures. Actually it will play anything that Quicktime can play, so it will play a wide range of audio files as well. I've been following a bit on the sideline, and the amount of work that has gone into the program is pretty amazing. In the same line of software there is Mefeedia (formerly Me-Tv) — a web-based specialised video feed reader.

I don't use either of these feed readers, I have an account at Mefeedia to see what Peter is doing with it, but that's it. I don't expect to begin using them in the future for the simple reason that I don't subscribe to video, I subscribe to people.

The underlying assumption with both ANT and Mefeedia is that video is more important than other types of content. That's the whole concept of an aggregator that only reads one type of media after all. It's a little bit pretentious, but I'll let that slide. The point is that when I click ‘Subscribe’ on Lisa's weblog for example I don't do it because there is video, I do it because Lisa has good content. As a reader/viewer/whatever I'm interested in what she has to say, not how she says it. That's why these specialised readers will not work for me.

They still serve a purpose in my world. With a bit of luck applications like ANT and Mefeedia will open the eyes of the people who produce regular feed readers to think about enclosures, and how to support them. I need to have everything in the same feed reader. I don't want to have to check Lisa's blog in three places (one for text, audio and video). I want Lisa to be one accesspoint in my feed reader, because it's Lisa I'm interested in (not in that way, perverts). As a small example Eric Rice did a short demonstration of how to get audio entries to show up in ANT. It was very nice, now ANT just need to start supporting text. Where would Lisa's blog entries fit in anyway? I picked her as my example because she mixes media freely on her blog.

My demands aren't many. It would be easy to get a rudementary support for “rich” media in my favourite feed reader. A simple note that audio or video content (or any other kind of enclosure, really) is available would go a long way. The reader doesn't need to download these enclosures in the background, in fact I would prefer if it didn't. I will screen the audio/video content by the text description anyway — an automatic download would just waste bandwidth. Using Quicktime's Fast Start so the whole file doesn't have to download before starting playback gets rid of the waiting problem, and blog entries are short anyway.

All I'm asking for is a little icon and title or file name. I can then click to view the audio/video. The feed reader wouldn't support playback within the feed reader — it should hand off a pointer to the operating system so my default player will handle playback. That way the feed reader will handle all types of files out of the box.