As is true of most good Americans, I love cheesy American pop culture and entertainment. When I first came to Spain, I thought it was so weird that most Spanish families only had one television set for the whole family, and in fact, a lot of families didn’t have cable/satellite tv. In my humble, middle-class family, each of us had our own television set with our own cable box. And eventually we each got our own VCRs as well. My parents reasoned that it was the best way to avoid fights over which program to watch. Family time has a very different meaning in the US.

So when I first came to Europe, one of the things that I missed most was being able to keep up with my favorite television shows, and in general, with US pop culture. I left the US for London in 2000, when Sex and the City was at the height of its popularity, and a lot of my friends would make references that I could no longer appreciate. I started to feel like an outsider (apart from the whole Bush-winning-the-election thing) and was annoyed that British TV was about 2 seasons behind. Then, of course, there were shows like the Oscars, the Grammy’s, the BET Awards and the American Music Awards on which my favorite recording artists would appear and/or perform.

My friends and family would send me “care-packages” full of magazines and video cassettes on which they’d recorded all of my favorite series, but it was an imperfect solution. I’d often have to pray that the US video format would be compatible with my UK VCR. Sometimes it was. Often it wasn’t. And then there was always something that they couldn’t record for whatever reason. My friends would be talking about the performances, shows and appearances, and I would feel like a stranger in my own country. How many Europeans can appreciate who Oprah Winfrey is, or that most people my age grew up watching her on TV, or that Tom Cruise, Beyonce and Julia Roberts regularly go to her show to chat about their lives, and that everyone talks about it the day after?

I couldn’t ask my family and friends to record every American program and send it me, could I?

So it was great when I found out that I could read most of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal online. They keep me pretty up-to-date about politics, business and arts in the US. Then there are blogs like “Young, Black and Fabulous” and TMZ that tell me all about the trouble that my favorite celebrities are getting into, and give me the inside scoop into what is really going on in their deliciously troubled lives. Then I can go to Billboard.com and get a sense as to the music that’s popular in the US. I can then use a combination of iTunes and alternative downloading services to create CDs and play the music on my iPod (when it’s working).

That’s cool in terms of music and news generally, but until very recently, I hadn’t been able to see performances or television shows that I like. MTV and BET now show some of their awards shows and music videos online. It’s great, because now I don’t even have to watch all of the boring stuff like the speeches and artist introductions. I can go directly to the performers that I like and watch them perform.

YouTube was great for a while, but then Viacom and other media groups started threatening to sue them over copyrighted content. YouTube was cute as a start-up, but once Google got involved, the traditional media companies realised that a lot of money was at stake and that they didn’t want Google to make money off of their content. All of a sudden everyone was creating its own video player (and threatening to sue YouTube/Google if favourable revenue-sharing agreements could not be reached).

Too bad for YouTube, but better for me, because when I went home last Xmas, I discovered that ABC (one of the main television stations in the US) now allows me to watch some of my favorite television programs like Desperate Housewives and Heroes via their website. So when I am in the US, one of the first things that I do is watch all of my favorite shows via the Internet. One of the primary disadvantages of being an expat — alienation from your home culture — had found a technological solution. (Throw in cheap SKYPE calls, messenger and email, and the problem almost disappears.) Most of these video-on-demand services offered by the television networks aren’t available outside of the US and don’t cover the full repertoire of shows, which means that I have to rely on Canal+, which does a good job but isn’t always up-to-date (and shows lots of repeats).

This background info explains why it was great to read in the Wall Street Journal that the BBC launched its “iPlayer” (the name for its video-on-demand service) last week, which goes one step beyond what the US companies are willing to do. Or as the WSJ puts it, the BBC has “made most of its shows available to download over the Internet, free of charge, in what may be the boldest online broadcasting push by a large television network.” This means that people who enjoy British TV programs can catch some of their favorite shows online, free of charge, subject only to having to watch a couple of commercials. They can watch TV at their convenience, wherever they are, whenever they want.

I was also happy to see the BBC’s cautious approach to launching its iPlayer (click on the link and look under “videos”). The BBC has been testing the product since late 2006 with about 15,000 volunteers and notes that they are in no rush to get too many viewers right now, because they still want to focus on solving any early technical problems that might have resulted from a more general launch. This conservative approach to launching has resulted in early positive reviews, with London’s Evening Standard newspaper concluding that the iPlayer’s video quality was “surprisingly good” (according to the WSJ).

As I have stated consistently on my blog, I firmly believe that companies should not launch their products until the can proudly stand behind them. If the product doesn’t convince you, how will it convince a busy consumer already using other services?

Anyway, it was also interesting to see the BBC’s rationale for this move. Most major media players are losing customers (and revenues), as newspaper readers and television viewers move online, or away from the traditional offline formats. The Internet is completely disrupting traditional media businesses, from newspapers, to television, to music, to movies, and the traditional media companies with a little bit of vision (or hindsight, as the case might be) are reacting to their declining audiences by increasing their online presence. Mark Thompson, BBC’s director general, explains the BBC’s rationale much better than I can: “It is at least as big a redefinition of what TV can be, what radio can be, and what broadcasting can be, as colour Television was 40 years ago.”