Talk is Golden by KanTalk.com

The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is known for its commercial-free, high-quality programming like Frontline, Nova, and American Experience. It just launched a video-on-demand portal called PBS Video this week.

The portal is very much like Hulu, which offers the best online video viewing experience. The site already has over 130 full-episodes of nearly 20 programs, covering the topics of history, culture, nature, politics, economics, and more.

PBS said it would make thousands of hours of programming by this summer.

This Week is the political talk show program of ABC. Unlike at The Daily Show or Colbert Report, politicians come to the show for a serious discussion of domestic or international affairs, not being ridiculed.

Politicians do talk. And they speak well. Here are a few samples from the program: Senator John McCain talked about various issues; President Obama’s economics adviser Larry Summer talked about executive bonuses. Besides interviews with politicians, several commentators and reporters hold the round table discussion in each segment.

The video clips are available at This Week’s website.

Stephen Colbert used to be a corespondent of The Daily Show. Now he has his own show called Colbert Report.

In the show, Stephen plays himself as a political pundit and reporter who is “”well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiot.” He makes fun of himself, but even more so of politicians. Like Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama.

Over 3,000 video clips and the full episodes of the most recent three weeks are available from the Colbert Report’s website.

We’ve recommended Howcast before. Here is another how-to guide from U.K.: VideoJug.

Many of VideoJug’s how-to guide want to poke fun, such as How to do nothing at work and still get paid; others can be practical, such as How to moon walk like Michael Jackson, or How to fold a T-shirt in 2-second; and yet some others are just silly, such as How to fight a bear.

Now you got an idea. You’ll soon get a British accent, too.

We know that the global economy is in a big trouble because now business and finance news dominate the headlines everyday. Not everyone would take it well. But for English learners, the timing is perfect to get immersed in business English.

With about 390 million viewers around the world, CNBC dominates the coverage of global business through its cable programs. At its website, you can watch many of its video reports by region (U.S, Europe and Asia), as well as by interview type (CEO and analyst).

CNBC’s programs talk about money all the time (Mad and Fast), but watching them at its website is free.

It’s a fake news program, but many young people watch it as a primary source of news. That’s how popular The Daily Show has become under the host Jon Stewart.

With Jon playing straight and his “correspondents” reporting news, the Show loves to make fun of politicians and celebrities. That doesn’t scare away the bigwigs. From presidential candidates to movie stars, they were eager to get on the Show and be drilled by Jon.

You can watch a lot of video clips and some of the full episodes at The Daily Show’s website.

In the digital age, even the best newspapers are struggling to transform themselves. That includes Washington Post. One lifeline might offer a hope is to add video and audio reporting, so the paper has tried.

At it’s website, Washington Post puts the videos under two main categories: Documentary Video and Emerging Voices. The former features short video reporting that goes along with the articles covering domestic and international affairs; the latter has stories mostly related to the emerging countries like China and India.

We hope that Washington Post’s transformation succeeds for at least one reason: its video reports are great materials for English learners.

Reuters Newswires is another old media trying to transform itself in digital age; so far, the digital side of Reuters has been growing. That’s good news for English learners.

Competing with The Associated Press, Reuters deploys over 2,000 reporters in nearly 200 countries. It used to be all about breaking news at lighting speed. Now Reuters does more features and analysis, too.

Reuters puts out at least a dozen of video reports daily at its website. Each is usually less than three minutes long–a perfect “snack meal” of English contents. Take as many and as frequent as you can.