Streaming Media - October 2008 - (Page 56)

When streaming live, the player offered users a choice of English or Spanish. (The gavel-to-gavel Spanish-language translation was a first for any national political convention.) Like the Olympics in Beijing, the Democratic National Convention highlighted the respective advantages of streaming versus broadcast. For events targeting a mass audience, such as the Olympics gymnastics and swimming finals or Barack Obama’s acceptance speech in front of 40 million television viewers, broadcast is still the medium of choice. (One can only imagine the bandwidth and infrastructure that would have been required to enable 40 million simultaneous streams.) But for niche sports such as Tae Kwon Do or archery, or for viewers to watch speeches by their local congressperson, streaming is the way to go. The DNCC website offers 330 video-on-demand(VOD) clips of everything from high-profile speeches to obscure caucus meetings to speeches made at the 2004 convention. The DNCC planned to upload Spanish-language VOD clips in the weeks following the convention. Users can easily copy links to any of the VOD material and embed Senate race when, at one of his political rallies, he called Indian-American S. R. Sidarth a “macaca,” which is a French colonialist pejorative for native Africans. Allen’s mother was of French Tunisian descent. The problem for Allen was that Sidarth worked for Allen’s Democratic opponent, Jim Webb, and was videotaping the exchange. Within weeks, the video was streamed online and broadcast over the air. Largely as a result of that video, Webb narrowly defeated Allen (by less than 0.05%) and the Democrats seized control of the U.S. Senate by one vote. That incident marked the first salvo in a battle between political campaigns determined to control their messages and VBCJs equally determined to expose inconsistency and hypocrisy, i.e., the truth. Inspired by that moment and enabled by advances in small form-factor video streaming, VBCJs and videographer/ journalists working for both new and traditional media outlets have flooded the web with politically oriented video. YouTube is still the dominant distribution channel for all online video, including that which is focused on politics. Nielsen’s VideoCensus estimates that YouTube unconventional video The official website of the Democratic National Convention puts Barack Obama’s acceptance speech front and center. The UpTake trains amateur journalists to shoot video on mobile phones, focusing on stories ignored by the mainstream press. them in a website or email them to friends. All told, the site houses 6.1TB of video. During the convention, the DNCC also distributed daily video through YouTube and iTunes and was the most popular podcast for the week on iTunes. Controlling the Message Clicking on the “Watch Convention Videos” link on the DNCC website automatically plays the video of Obama’s acceptance speech, the one video that the DNCC most wants viewers to watch. In fact, the whole purpose of the DNCC’s streaming effort is to manage, control, and distribute to the widest possible audience the Democratic Party’s political message. The effort on the part of both political parties to control their messages is being challenged this year more than ever before by a newly empowered wave of video-based citizen journalists (VBCJs)—enabled by advances in smartphone and other consumer streaming technologies—which is swamping the web with game-changing reportage. The game changed for good in August 2006. Republican George Allen was leading in the Virginia 56 STREAMING MEDIA October/November 2008 captured 51% of the online video market in June 2008 with 4 billion out of 7.9 billion views. comScore gives YouTube 4.2 billion views during the same period, or 39% of what it estimates to be a bigger market. Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, estimates that 13 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Virtually all candidates and their supporters now stream video through scores of YouTube political channels. In addition to the candidates’ own channels, other popular nonpartisan political channels include You Choose ’08 and Veracifier as well as YouTube’s politics blog, Citizen Tube. Mobile Video Changes the Game The UpTake, a nonprofit based in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn.), is one of several new organizations that hope to generate and distribute political video from amateur and professional VBCJs. Launched in January 2008 in time for the Iowa caucuses, The UpTake recruits and trains new members to use mostly consumer-grade video technology to produce news stories. With a core staff of six, some of whom are correspondents who produce content,

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Streaming Media - October 2008 Table of Contents Standard Time Technology and Business Trends by the Numbers Encoding for Screencams Meeting the Enterprise Video Distribution Challenge Pulling Back the Curtain on Level 3 The 2008 Streaming Media Readers’ Choice Award Winners The Ultimate Guide to Creating Online Video Content That Works, Part 1 Brave New Platforms Video From the Democratic National Convention—Both Official and Unofficial—Made Clear That It’s No Longer Politics as Usual Creative Suite Turns 4 The Future of Internet Radio Decoding the Truth About Hi-Def Video Production Educating the Next Generation of Online Media Makers ViewCast Niagara GoStream SURF The Past and Future of Online Video: I’m Not Dead Yet!

Streaming Media - October 2008

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