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Salmon Days is spawned

Click here for swearing, nudity, violence and English accents

Salmon Days is Go. This is the URL: www.salmondays.tv.

Remember, it's a trailer - and there is swearing, nudity, violence and English accents.

Bookmark and enjoy.

Now comes the corporate bit.

THE REGISTER LAUNCHES WORLD'S FIRST PAY-PER-VIEW VIDEO STRIP

The world's first pay-per-view weekly video strip makes its debut on The Register Website on Thursday, October 25.

Called Salmon Days, the live-action video strip is a comedy inspired by The Bastard Operator from Hell (BOFH), a fictitious character with his own weekly column in The Register, the UK's most popular IT news site.

The first episode of Salmon Days is free and subsequent 30-second trailers will also be free. Each episode will then cost 20p each. To cater for a series of small charges to a potentially large audience, viewers in the UK will have a number of options for paying for content. They will be able to pay via their BT Cellnet or Vodafone account or via a premium telephone line.

A credit card subscription option for The Register's overseas readership - 75 per cent of the total - is also in the pipeline.

BOFH is a character with whom the readers of The Register identify - the author and owner of BOFH, Simon Travaglia, is a networking manager in New Zealand. As a result, the weekly BOFH column has a large cult following.

Each episode of Salmon Days is likely to be between three and five minutes long. As such there will be no soap-style continuation from week to week but a mix of sketch comedy and a short story with a beginning, middle and end focusing around specific subjects such as: IT equipment and services; stupid users; stupid vendors' drinking, eating and generally indulging to excess; lampooning characters, products and advertising campaigns; current affairs; being overworked; etc. etc.

The brief for Salmon Days is to be amusing, ironic, edgy and to take an educated swipe at the IT industry, its products and the clones it has spawned. Salmon Days is not a bitter anti-capitalist rant but, aims to pronounce the utter stupidity of the current office automation scenario (personal computers were meant to free us from the tyranny of central computing etc) and the appalling "why bother?" state of innovation which all IT users have been driven to accept as the norm (In reality nothing has been innovated in our industry for 20 years).

Salmon Days is produced in partnership between three London companies: The Register, Remote and culturejam.

Drew Cullen, co-editor of The Register, said: "We have been approached before to collaborate on broadband, but Salmon Days is the first proposal that made sense to us. Business news on broadband doesn't work - if it did there would be hundreds of business TV channels. We think that broadband is an entertainment medium. And we're going to make sure that Salmon Days is very entertaining."

James Wickes, MD of culturejam, said: "Revenue streams are the big problem for Web-based businesses which are still grappling with the problem of making users of their sites pay for the information that they use. The Salmon Days video strip is to be paid for by users as well as the sponsor / advertiser. And the combination of revenue streams proposed for Salmon Days could become a highly effective, more general solution."

Russell Stopford, Salmon Days' director from Remote, said: "We can take more creative risks with broadband content than is normal with television, which makes it fun to make. It should also make it more enjoyable to watch - I'm still laughing at Salmon Days and I've seen it about 300 times."

Salmon Days is hosted and streamed physically by Akamai, the world's premier streaming media distribution company. Encoding is supplied by culturejam. Encoding is the process which receives the least focus in the web video production process and yet has the most impact on playback quality.

Salmon Days is a joint collaboration between three London-based companies: Remote Film, culturejam and The Register. Remote is the creative force behind Salmon Days, supplying video production expertise, scripting, filming, editing and acting talent. culturejam supplies the web video streaming knowhow and project management skills that keeps it all running. The Register supplies the audience, the promotion, and the merchandise. ®

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