NHK gold.

Are you looking for quality video content on the interwebs suitable for the whole family? You can thank NHK, aka Japan Broadcasting Corporation, because they've created a virtual goldmine of quality content from their video library. This morning while reading this blog (Japanese), I came across a post about NHK's Creative Library, and spent the rest of the morning browsing it.

While NHK's Creative Library content is not shared under the Creative Commons licenses, their copyright rules very much mimic Creative Commons'. I have not read through the whole agreement yet, but basically you're allowed to download, copy, and share with friends or via the web through homepages, blogs, etc. Video is downloadable in MPEG4 (*.mp4) format at 640x360 resolution. Yay, widescreen. Boo, no high-res!

While the page is entirely in Japanese, navigation can be done using the neato icons:

(Click on the image for a readable image) Starting from the top we have:

• Living Things (land animals, aquatic animals, airborne animals, plants/fungi, and insects
• Scenes of Japan (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, Japan towns/living)
• Scenes of the World (Asia, Europe, North America, Central/South America, Africa, Oceania, the Poles)
•  CG/Special Effects/Images (environmental problems, natural phenomena, space/heavenly bodies, natural environment)
• Transportation (land, aquatic, sky transportation)
• Colors (red, blue, green, white, black)
• Music, Sound Effects (music, sound effects)

Most interesting to me is the color concept. If you chose blue for example, you get different videos of water, sky, dusk or early morning, etc... it's pretty interesting. If you like quality source video, NHK provides some of the best. They're not high-res but they're free to view and share. Yet another way to travel the world from your desk.

I'm sure some innovative hackers programmers out there will come up with some great applications for these videos. I wouldn't mind having a these videos randomly streamed to a media interface like XBMC or something to act as a screensaver. That would be pretty sweet. Enjoy!