Kapitanleutnant Gunter Rabe stepped aboard his new craft, his crew stood to attention... everything was prepared. All he had to do was to give the order, mooring warps would be slipped and they’d leave the ship’s birth place; but first he wanted to savour the moment. After all, it’s not every day a young 20 something would take command of one of the most sophisticated weapons of war the world had ever seen. As for the regime, well, his thoughts on that were best left private.

Pod3.tv Ltd, the UK’s award winning video podcast WebTV company, is pleased to announce the appointment of Oliver Rothschild as its non-executive Chairman.

Neil Fairbrother Founder and CEO of pod3.tv Ltd, welcomed the appointment saying:
"We are delighted that Oliver Rothschild has agreed to join pod3.tv as Chairman. We believe that Oliver will bring significant experience and international credibility to the Board of pod3.tv as we rapidly expand our range of content, both home grown and sourced from third parties”.

Earlier this year, the 7 inch vinyl record celebrated its 60th year; happy birthday. However, I for one never liked them. I found them to be... inconvenient, fiddly, delicate things and even as a young kid thought there had to be a better way. I’m not sure which was worse, singles which by their nature had to be swapped for another one after 3 minutes of play, or albums which always had to be turned over in the middle of the best bit, Dark Side of the Moon being a classic example with the irritating interruptus splitting the best rock playlist of Time, The Great Gig in the Sky, (turnover), Money and Us & Them.

And then there was all the background noise - the pops and crackles which just don’t feature in live music and which I find to be a total distraction... and stuck needles and fluff... and having to clean the disks and they’d warp...

So the farmer, for thousands of years, sowed his seed on the furrowed ground of a ploughed field; the fertile imagination and ingenuity of man planted the seeds of wireless mass communications in the late 1800’s and radio blossomed a few years later, for entertainment and information. Rather than invent a new word to describe this new medium the English language did what it’s good at and repurposed an old word from a totally different place - the world of the farmer, that most ancient of human industrial activity, was suddenly propelled to the forefront of technology as we began to “broadcast” through the ether.

There are many claims as to who invented radio, with many famous names in the roll call of honour... Maxwell, Marconi, Edison, Franklin, Tesla and Faraday are just some of the illustrious ones that contributed towards the development, exploitation and commercialisation of radio as we know it today.

It happens to all of us from time to time. You're engaged in a discussion about a given topic - could be in a business meeting or a dinner party or some other social function, or complete waste of time such as Ecademy discussion or Twitter, or frolicking with Facebook Friends, when your world wobbles and your become uncertain of your point of view.

Alternatively, in similar circumstances you want some other point of view with which to over come your interlocutor, or with which to change tack completely*, or to present yourself as the voice of reason, the devil's advocate.

It is with great delight (or Angel Delight, but deffo not Sunny Delight) that the SH Store brings you a fine selection of hand crafted, thoroughly un-researched, un-copyrightable, misspelt and grammatically incorrect POINTS OF VIEW.

The thrill of the open road! The wind in your hair! The excitement of freewheeling down hill! For many cycling is a pleasure and with TEAM GB's recent performance at the Olympics, we seem pretty good at it, giving Johnny Foreigner a total and absolute thrashing which they'll never live down so much for our EU partners we won the war anyway....

... but many are put off cycling as they feel frightened by the swooshing downhill in a somewhat out of control I'm going to fall off and die type of feeling. And indeed, falling off and dying does tend to spoil most peoples' day, even a spot of road rash as your skin is scrapped of as you slide along the tarmac can be an upsetting experience for some misguided whimps.

I recently represented "media" at a career fair at Dr Challoners High School in Amersham Bucks. Once again I was blown away by the "Yoof of Today"... the Careers Fair was well attended and I spoke myself hoarse as I had so many young folk asking about careers in the "Media". From 14 to 18, male and female, there were technical oriented folk as well as creative folk wondering what they need to do to get into the industry.

It was quite an overwhelming experience.

This was swiftly followed by coffee and cakes with TVU, to discuss how Media Studies could include podcasts, video podcasts, production, design and content. Apparently there are a lot of ex-bankers, and other folk, that have recently been made redundant queuing up to retrain as teachers, it being regarded as a "safe" option.

The BBC, ITV and Channel 4 all have an on-line presence, notably the iPlayer. For some time now they've been collaborating on a Video on Demand project called Kangaroo whereby their content is made available from one jointly run location.

Yesterday the Competition Commission stopped the project in its tracks as in their view Kangaroo would present too much of a threat to competition for independent VOD suppliers, such as pod3.tv. There had been an interim report published in December, which expressed concerns about this, but in the opinion of the Competition Commission had not been sufficiently addressed.

"After detailed and careful consideration, we have decided that this joint venture would be too much of a threat to competition in this developing market and has to be stopped," said Peter Freeman, Chairman of the Commission.

We support young people in as many ways as we can - work experience and the Young Enterprise scheme.

The group we currently support has launched a "Fairy Training School" where young girls can "qualify" to be a "real" Fairy... and their local paper has just published this article about them!
A great result, well done Noire Crafts!

If you're in or around the Amersham area, and have a young girl that would like to become a fully certified fairy, do contact us here (neil@pod3.tv) and we'll pass your details on to Noire.

Wo! What's all that white stuff doing piled up outside my door? Last time we had snow like this it took 3 hours to do the 15 miles to the studio... so I think I'll hunker down at home for the morning before venturing out.

I do need to get to the studio as we have an important meeting tomorrow morning which we need to prep for and print off some documents and so on...

...but at least my whizzy new broadband service from BeThere is helping me crack on. Although well short of the promised 11Mbps (delivers about 3.5Mbps downstream) it's been a painless experience swapping supplier.