When the average American watches the evening news there is precious little international coverage. And you can bet that what there is pays scant regard to the millions of lives affected each year in the world’s poorest countries by disease and malnutrition.

And it’s the same when it comes to newspapers. Throughout the United States thousands of editorial jobs have been lost, budgets cut and revenue restricted which has led to a narrowing of coverage. And this means less room for stories about the world’s poor who after all don’t vote and don’t buy advertising.

And here lies the paradox. Because the United States is also responsible for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on fighting these killer diseases in the developing world. The Government through its various aid projects and wealthy private sector organizations such as the Gates Foundation.

So how do we square this circle? There is clearly both the interest and the money to fight disease but no place for coverage in traditional media. Part of the answer here lies in new technology. Take Global Health TV as an example. The channel tackles many of the issues talked about here and is funded via several initiatives. But even so being a web based channel it suffers from the normal competition driving traffic to its site.

So enter the EdgePlayer. Global Health TV has transformed its reach by putting video players on high profile sites whilst retaining control of the content played on them. Take a look at thelancet.com and globalhealthcouncil.org as examples. And the result is over 100, 000 people each month tuning into coverage on global health. And given the problems we have to deal with that coverage is invaluable.

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.