NerdTV

PBS has a new series called NerdTV where the shows are released online, for free.

NerdTV is a new weekly online TV show from PBS.org technology columnist Robert X. Cringely. NerdTV is essentially Charlie Rose for geeks - a one-hour interview show with a single guest from the world of technology. Guests like Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy or Apple computer inventor Steve Wozniak are household names if your household is nerdy enough, but as historical figures and geniuses in their own right, they have plenty to say to ALL of us. NerdTV is distributed under a Creative Commons license so viewers can legally share the shows with their friends and even edit their own versions. If not THE future of television, NerdTV represents A future of television for niche audiences that have deep interest in certain topics.

They just started 2 weeks ago and have released two shows.  They are about an hour long each and I’ve watched part of both of them, both of which were very interesting.  But if you don’t have an hour to spare (which I don’t really right now), you’ll see on each show’s page there are two links called "The Juicy Bit" and "The Nerdy Bit," which are short clips of some of the best parts of each interview.

The second episode (the current one) features PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, and it’s extremely interesting because he shares lots of business insight, and also insight into some habits of engineer-types, such as why we tend to pull all-nighters often.

Aside from the content being awesome, this distribution model totally rocks.  I’d so love for Fox News to distribute The Factor this way, so I could watch it during the day at my leisure, instead of having to be at home and in front of the TV at 8PM or 11PM.