TV network PBS announced late last month the beta launch of the new PBS Video Portal, which contains episodes from about a dozen different shows with plenty more to come, including Web-specific content. (PBS promises that local affiliates will be able to make their content available on the new portal as well.) It's available at http://www.pbs.org/video.

From the front page you can look at some featured content or you can browse by topic or by show listings. There are few enough shows that browsing by listings is easy; series available include Frontline, NOVA, Nature, Antiques Roadshow, and of course Julia Child! Each show has its own page with episode listings -- the ones I looked at had between 10 and 20 full episodes available for viewing. (In a couple of cases it was only two or three.) For some programs like Nature there were actually episode transcripts available.

Pick an episode and you'll have to wait a moment or two for it to load, but it's not too bad. The viewer window is pretty small, though, and I was disappointed how the episodes of Nature looked when I enlarged them to full-size on my screen. I'm sorry an intermittent size wasn't available -- the in-browser player's a little too small and full-screen is too big, at least on my monitor.

On the other hand, the wide variety of shows available is great. It's a fraction of what PBS has offered in toto but the old favorites like Nature and Julia Child combined with more recent offerings means that there's a lot to see here. Now, if I could just get Lawrence Welk through this portal, I think I would finally be able to talk a certain one of my family members into trying the Internet...