One of the things that I love about the internet today is the fact that there can be all sorts of emerging players in the video and audio broadcasting business.  One such company is VBS.tv.  While VBS.tv hardly seems to be the guy-in-the-garage (Viacom and MTV played a part in their start), they are doing a lot of things right as far as TV on the web.

The first and foremost is the player they are using for their shows (I believe they use Ooyala for streaming video). There are lots of ways to play video on the web and the experience is fairly consistent: buffering at the beginning and if you want to move to another part in the video then you can move the playhead to a new part of the timeline and the buffering starts again. Unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot that somebody can do about the buffering bit for now, but the VBS player does something very helpful that other players don’t do. It shows different thumbnails for different parts of the show so it takes a lot of guessing out of the equation in terms of where you will land when the video resumes.  Try it out in the embedded profile on surfer Dan Malloy below.

The second thing that the site is doing well is that they offer a wide variety of programming that scratches the niche itch. Examples include Hi Shredability (surfing), Motherboard (nerdy stuff), and Shot by Kern (boob alert!). Not all shows are updated on a regular basis but there seems to be enough new content on a weekly basis that it is worth a periodic visit or an RSS feed subscription.

The final thing I want to highlight is the fact that they enable the skipping of ads. The link to skip the ad shows up after just a few seconds. Okay, so they force you to watch a few seconds of an ad, but the fact that they allow a skip after a few seconds is cool by me.

VBS.tv has been around for a couple years already, but I just discovered them today.  If you’ve never seen it, it is definitely worth a quick look.  If you have seen it and have found other web networks or channels that are doing cool things, feel free to share your findings in the comments below!  Cheers.