A while back I commented on the rise of healthcare-related audio podcasts. I nearly missed the fact that the BBC have, since November 2004, been beta testing BBC News Player feeds. Among the test feeds is one for health stories. This feed contains footage from BBC's TV news reports so differs in content from the existing text-only health-news feed from the news.bbc.co.uk site.
As noted here, the feeds do not link directly to the streaming video; this is displayed embedded in a web page to give it proper "context":
As is typical on the Internet, a net denizen has created an unofficial feed list that does link directly to the streaming media (Real Player or Windows Media Player required). Ben Metcalfe offers links to broadband streams (also requiring a UK IP address) and narrowband streams so that clicking on an article title will open the appropriate media player rather than a web page with embedded video:
The real utility of this service (official or unofficial) is that you can now catch important BBC News items without having to wait up for the next bulletin, or having to visit the main News website to see which health stories have video associated with them. Using Metcalfe's feeds also means you can be listening the audio of one article opened in Real Player (say), while at the same time be reading other posts in your RSS aggregator or newsreader (e.g. Safari).
These days anything that helps us multi-task has to be a good thing, right?
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