I wanted to let everyone know about the truly excellent archived television resources of CT1 available on the web. I've been using this site in my Czech classes this quarter and it is simply the best quality streaming web video I've seen, period. It's equal to what you see for downloadable movie trailers. The only drawback is that you can only watch the content as live streaming video over Real Player or Windows Media Player, which makes it difficult to pause and rewind easily or to go to a specific segment (but it's not impossible).

http://www.czech-tv.cz/vysilani/

The site features a full archive of around 67(!) television shows for the past three months, featuring everything from game shows to fishing programs to cooking shows to shows for the hearing impaired with sign language and subtitles. I've particularly found the David Letterman/Jay Leno clone talk show, Uvolněte se, prosím, to be very useful and also a game show, A-Z Kvíz (for grown ups) and A-Z Kvíz Junior (for kids; and yes, we usually watch the kid version). There are so many shows available that we haven't managed to even check out all the options this quarter. The talk show is also great for seeing all kinds of spoken Czech varieties as well as Slovak (one we watched today was the Prague-speaking Czech host interviewing a Slovak TV personality; we've also seen some Moravian as well).

Does anyone know of any other comparable sites for other Slavic languages, particularly Russian, Polish, BCS? Again, this is very high quality video in great quantity as well, all available free and on demand. I've not seen anything like it elsewhere, but hopefully this is the wave of the future for great resources for language teaching.

Enjoy,

Steven