“A word in your ear…” Mercedes Benz and iTunes

Just wanted to tip you off about my latest discovery, the Mercedes-Benz Audio and Video Podcasts, which are available free on iTunes. You can listen to or view them on your PC or Mac monitor, or download them to your iPod – which is handy if you want to add a bit of variety to your normal commuting diet of music and more music.

In all there are sixteen different podcast series, mostly in English but including several in German and one in Italian. As you’d expect, the majority of the strands are about Mercedes-Benz cars, with, for example, four episodes covering the creation of the new C-Class (recently nominated in the shortlist for the Car of the Year Award) from the idea to the product.

Mercedes-Benz calls these video podcasts ‘Infotainment’, because they’re entertaining as well as informative. But be warned, even if you’re not a car enthusiast, you may find yourself drooling down the front of your shirt as you admire the automotive pulchritude on display at the recent Frankfurt Motor Show while you’re travelling to work on the crowded underground – wishing instead that you were comfortably cocooned behind the wheel of your own Merc.

Music podcast

By the way, there are a couple of non-car podcasts: One strand is about the key Asian fashion shows (which is presumably of great interest to a) fashionistas, b) Asians and c) Asian fashionistas) while the biggest series (49 episodes to date) offers a fortnightly audio podcast showcasing three recently released international music tracks. These are introduced and reviewed by a smooth-as-velvet-voiced musicologist called Julian Smith. The tracks cover a wide range of genres, from soul and electronica to hip-hop and beyond.

You can play or download individual podcasts any time, but you can also subscribe (free) to them, so that new episodes are automatically downloaded to your computer.

You can access the podcasts via here: or on iTunes at the iTunes Store. Just key Mercedes-Benz podcasts into the ‘Search iTunes Store’ window (located in the top right-hand corner of the page).

If you want to keep up to date, not just with podcasts, but also with everything else that’s happening at Mercedes-Benz, bookmark their news site at Mercedes Benz Site. Better still, if you click on the RSS icon that appears at the end of the url window of your web browser when you’re at that site, and then add the link to your RSS feeds, you can receive automatic notification of the latest news feeds. Technology, eh. Don’t you just love it!