I think one of the key words for 2009 is momentum. And it applies to everything doesn’t it. Barack Obama’s election win is a good example but it applies right across the board. In fact two English Premiership football managers lost their jobs yesterday because their sides lack momentum. Big or small, if you haven’t got it you’re in trouble.

And television has it in droves right now. I was looking at an incredible set of figures that just seem to break record after record. It appears that this year’s Super Bowl had 100 million viewers making it the most watched sporting event in US TV history. And the figures for on-line video are even more staggering. By my calculation there have been some 500 million requests to view from the websites of British broadcasters over the last year or so. With the BBC’s iPlayer alone accounting for some 300 million of those.

So it seems that we’re watching more television than ever across an almost bewildering array of formats. Our own work with the EdgePlayer, which allows companies and other organisations to host video on their sites without any of the traditional technical issues has thrown up some interesting results with literally hundreds of thousands of people watching content in this way.

So the revolution is well and truly with us across all platforms. But if the revolution is with us we still haven’t figured out how to pay for it. The same terrestrial broadcasters with record numbers of viewers are making cuts in programme budgets and even the greatest on-line video phenomena of them all – YouTube – is a long way off covering its costs, let alone making money.

So where’s this all going to end? I’m afraid we’ve already started to see broadcasting casualties in this recession and we will see many more. Because we live in the real world and revolutions in the 21st century have to be backed by a good business plan.

We’re no strangers to global distribution here at WebsEdge. Our programmes are produced and distributed all round the world.

But even we were staggered by the success of our latest venture. We’ve teamed up with The Lancet to distribute our Global Health TV Channel through their website. It’s a nifty bit of kit. It’s effectively a video player with a number of sources, which sits on their home page – please go and check it out for yourselves. www.thelancet.com

Now what’s really interested me is the reach the player has achieved. Within a week of launch it’s not just the number of visitors that got my attention but also the number of countries it was viewed in. We now have Global Health TV viewers in over 155 different countries. Now that’s incredible.

And I think we’re seeing the beginning of a new trend here. You see the beauty of our player – we call it the EdgePlayer – is that you can give it a new skin and put it on any relevant site. You feed the content to it from a central location thus creating a virtual community for your video unobtainable from a traditional site or web based TV channel.

This has been a wake up call for us here at WebsEdge. Like many other media companies we have long produced vast amounts of content destined for both traditional television and web based channels. But all that content has required the viewer – in some way – to come to us. Now we’re able to go out to that viewer wherever they may be. I hear Global Health TV is big in Argentina right now and I for one can hardly wait to see where it goes next.