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.

Multi-touch interfaces make all the sense in the world especially for activities such as sifting through and viewing photos and videos. So why is it taking so long for manufacturers of dedicated digital cameras and camcorders to update their now outdated interfaces? Canon and Sony had better wake up and smell the coffee. Multi-touch is where it is at. That is where it has been at for the last couple years.

Seriously, Canon and Sony, bite the bullet and license the technology. Spend a few R&D dollars and design an intuitive user interface so that consumers don’t have to repeatedly click some stupid button next to the LCD screen to jump from one image to the next. C’mon, somebody on the design team must own an iPhone or iPod Touch, right? Why isn’t that dude speaking up at the design meetings? Grow a pair and tell the rest of the people in the room that they are designing product like it is 2006.

I’ll tell you what, I’m ready to plunk a few bucks on an HD camcorder this holiday season, but I swear, if I’m looking at the same old shitty interfaces to navigate through photos and video clips come December, I’m gonna hold off and keep using the old standard def Handycam that I bought back in 2005. And I’ll convince all my friends to wait for multi-touch too. Then you (the spineless executive) will have to regurgitate the same excuse you used last year about how the economic downturn softened consumer demand and that is why you didn’t hit your numbers. F that shit.

Heads should roll for not embracing technologies that would drastically improve the value of your products and get customers to open up their wallets. In certain years, you might need to truly innovate to offer product that is a significant improvement over last year’s model. This year, you just need to be an “also-ran” in the multi-touch race to take your products to the next level. Now is not the time to count all the buttons in your factories that have yet to be assembled into your current product line. Stop thinking about how big a write-off it would be if you didn’t use another one of those buttons again. Instead, do yourself, your company, and your customers a big favor and start acting like it is 2009 (and late 2009 at that)!