Recently I noticed that there was something called #grid09. Don´t know what it was, but the event seems to attract attention and interest (including from me). Half an hour ago @eovemar tweeted that the videos from GRID09 were available. Ten minutes earlier, in another context,  @wacka wrote:

”Media sites = quick updates for me. But the latest stuff is increasingly(?) TV/video only. I don’t have the time! I want to read!”

My immediate thought was to give Fredrik Wackå a response and say something like the following:

Listening more than reading

I want to read too, not books or other stuff, but letters off the Web. More importantly, I take in a lot of audio. Mainly from podcasts and audio books. But also by listening to the audio streams from videos,where the image part, quite frequently, does not add much value.

When videos are valuable

The problems, or perhaps rather the valuable situations, are when the videos are indeed useful to see. It may be because of the presenter’s slides, rethorics or something you name it. Furthermore, I simply do not want to sit down at the laptop and watch video. My main solution is to watch videos in my mobile.

Watching video mobile

These days I watch more and more videos on my HTC Magic (before it on my iPhone). Mostly in the subway or in bed. Either online streamed (from YouTube and TED) or video files transfered into my mobile. The latter is rather cumbersome to set up, because most video streaming services/publihers do not allow or support downloading. A challenge that I sometimes can solve by using various ripping software.

But not from GRID09

Back to GRID09 and their ”Videos on demand” (bonnier.com/en/gridmeeting). I went there, to a site that looks nice and clean. The videos are there, the speakers and the subjects look very interesting. But, I won’t see the GRID09 videos, because I cannot download them. The streaming platform they use (TV4 Play, a service from Bonnier) have disabled downloading (via my main ripper Real Player Plus). GRID09 does not even support any ”share functionality”. That is, functions that help us tell our friends through various social networking services.

Too bad.