Sunday, July 04, 2010

The power of Blip.tv,YouTube, iTunes and the Interweb!

Those who may have been following my ramblings for a while may well have picked up on one of my iPod favourites Carpool. This is a series of video recordings made by Robert Llewellyn ( aka Kryten from Red Dwarf...  Scrapheap Challenge ....How do they do it? and many more UK shows).
Robert has been dabbling in 'new media' since the early days with varying degrees of success, much as many of us he really 'got it' as far as using free new media such as Blip.tv,  iTunes and YouTube in 2008 it was then that he decided to launch Carpool,  a series of 30 minute-ish car journeys with well known people ( celebs and others less well known generally) where he would taxi them in his Toyota Prius chatting and generally having a good time. These clips were then uploaded originally through Blip.tv and also to iTunes and through Robert's web portal LlewTube in fact the power of the web came into play with the first episode which was downloaded over 4,000 times before any announcement of its existence had been posted!!!!
Carpool has gone on to gain an audience of over 2 million and has run into over 74 episodes ( there were a few lost due to technical issues) most of which are hugely amusing and I would recommend anyone with a 'UK' sense of humour and of the absurd to download a few episodes .... I believe you will get hooked quite quickly and will want more!

The show has succeeded because the combination of Robert's personality and that of his Carpool passengers. The good news that you will see in the announcement show above is that Carpool the videopodcast is now going to 'proper TV' as it has been commissioned as a show by Dave a UK satellite channel [link]. It is great to see that a show which began as an online experiment in new media  will now make it to a wider audience, Robert has also promised that posting to all previous outlets will continue.
Well done to Robert and all those who have made Carpool what it is, we the audience ( I can't actually get Dave on my TV!) look forward to the next chapter in the story.

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