Since I first started Genki English I’ve always seen it as being full of video clips. The web is such a great medium for short bits of video that make it easier to get the information across, and if you look at all the old media interviews, I was always saying things like “Genki English will become a web TV station!”. I’ve tried things in the past, but even with broadband it always seems soooo much hassle. You have to click a link, wait for the player to load ( in a new window!), wait for it to buffer, stop-start-stop-start, then at the end of the day the video quality isn’t that good! Last year I thought I had a right when I put up the broadband videos of my English workshop on the site, but I get messages all the time from people saying “Oh, it looks good, but I couldn’t be bothered to wait for it to load!”. The curse of giving away things for free I guess!

But things are changing. In Japan now, basically everyone has broadband, it’s just a case of standard 10MbpS or the super new fiber optic 100MbpS. So what I want is video to be like a graphic on screen, where you just press the button and it starts playing straight away, with no techie hassles or delays. And I think I’ve found out how to do it!

I spent the day messing around with some new video technology and it really does seem to work! So I quickly redid the Workshop Video pages, and it’s great that they load up straight away, and without opening a new window! Flushed with this success I tried some other ideas. Over the past few years I’ve been filming loads of little clips of allsorts, none of it’s complete enough to go on a DVD, but it’s great for the web! One of my favourites is in an English Sweet Shop. So I edited it up and put it on the kids site! For teachers, a small little screen is cool, but for kids it really does need to be big and bold, and I think it really works. The problem is that if it is a lower quality it loads really quickly, but I tried it on the site as a higher quality one and I’ll see what the feedback is. ( Oh, I can hear the critics now “How dare you test things on your viewers!” – it’s free for goodness sake, get over it!). If it works though, this could be really cool, because with video the genkiness certainly gets passed on!

Have a look and see for yourself!