finding our way around indecision

It's 2007. I first watched video (albeit a sorry excuse for it) on the World Wide Wave at least ten (10) years ago. You'd think that ten years on it would be easy to find a video of a major address by the leader of the free world, but that wasn't my experience last night.

So yeah, I had some sadistic or masochistic, I don't know which, impulse to watch the president's 2007 State of the Union address.

I went to YouTube. A bunch of parodies, but no speech.

I went to Google Video (don't ask why, I just did it). There it is! Click... "This video is currently unavailable." Wake up, Google, you'll never take over the world like that.

Okay, screw it, skip the middleman, I went straight to the source: CSPAN! Or not. One link brought up an error because the page had some unrecognizable extension like .rhsp or something. Another link just hung there, one of those Internet lovelies that sends your cursor into 'working' mode without anything actually happening.

Right. ABC News. Good lord, no. They seem to have some inkling that video can be transmit over the web, but they sure don't understand the implications. I think they're still trying to figure out cable.

It shouldn't be this hard. It shouldn't.

I finally found the speech, easily and in good quality (even at fullscreen), on the CBS News site. If you're looking for news video, I highly recommend these guys. The organization is fantastic, everything works well, you can create your own playlist, and there's lots of content to keep you wasting time after you've found what you were looking for. The only drawback is having to watch a commercial before every clip. But I seem to recall TV being the same way, long long ago.