Firstly an apology to regular readers for the rather formulaic WorldTV posts of late.
All this excitement about preparing WorldTV for launch has left me rather devoid of time for other posts. A belated honeymoon with the wife, a growing addiction to Facebook, and a first child on the way has added to the mild confusion.
It’s been an exciting day round here though – news that RCTV in Venezuela were beginning to put out their now banned broadcasts via YouTube spurred us to rebroadcast them in a WorldTV style. It should be a good test of our hardware and systems and is leading us to develop some new features which will benefit all users.
We were shocked by the actions of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez in silencing the independant media in a move that can only be seen as leading to a dictatorship. Should the government there move to block YouTube, we hope to be able to offer an alternative source for RCTV’s bulletins out of Caracas for Venezuelan’s worldwide.
If you don’t know about the situation in Venezuela, read up on it. It’s a pretty worrisome state of affairs. In the past I’ve always thought of Hugo Chavez as something of a welcome revolutionary, but when you silence the opposition media, push through bills that eliminate elections (thus allowing indefinite terms of office) and create new laws for creating new laws (so they don’t have to be referred to Parliament), revolution turns to something more sinister.