Updated at 11 a.m. to clarify that the change.gov site with the YouTube video of the Obama's radio address has text links to the same video on AOL, MSN, and Yahoo. YouTube still has premier position as the secretary of video...
It's great that President-elect Barack Obama is delivering his regularly scheduled Saturday address in both audio and video form. After using the Internet to help him get elected and connect with younger voters, it's clear that his team will continue to exploit the media to deliver its messages and stimulate dialog.
Obama has chosen to upload the video of his Saturday address to Google's YouTube, by far the most dominant video-sharing service, and embed the video on his Change.gov transition site.
The video has already garnered more than 500,000 views, and this is just the beginning of the Obama's administration's use of video. Post-inauguration, there will likely be a White House YouTube channel to push the administration's agenda and to hopefully to provide more transparency.
My question is why favor YouTube? It's obvious that YouTube is the way to reach the most people. According to Nielsen Online's VideoCensus, Google's service served 5.35 billion video streams in September 2008. Yahoo, the closest competitor, had 264 million.
But why should the incoming president, or public official, favor one Internet video service over another? Yahoo, MSN, Blip, Veoh, and other video-sharing sites shouldn't have to lobby the White House for equal time or at least some time. I am sure the choice of YouTube was practical, and has nothing to do with Google CEO Eric Schmidt's very public support of Obama.
Implicit product endorsements are difficult to avoid for any public official. If Obama prefers a BlackBerry, Apple can't do much to fix that problem. But, Obama is rarely seen in pictures with his Blackberry and The New York Times reports that he is going to have to give up his favorite communications device.
In the case of uploading video, the Obama team can create its own branded, video-sharing service neutral video player that allows anyone in the world to embed the content. That might be a more equitable way for Obama to spread his message, and he could still have a YouTube channel.
(Credit:
change.gov)
On Tuesday, October 28, I will be participating in a roundtable discussion on the state of online video pulled together by Beet.TV impresario Andy Plesser, with executives from AOL, MySpace, Yahoo, MSNBC, CNN, Microsoft, Akamai, The Washington Post, Dow Jones and several other companies. Tune into the live Webcast at 9:00 AM EST.
Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet and Google's chief Internet evangelist, talked with Beet.tv's Andy Plesser about the future of video and broadband at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York.
Cerf expects that video will be downloaded rather than streamed over time. With gigabit for second speed, users could download an hour of video in 16 seconds. "It's like the iPod--you can download music faster than you can listen to it," he said. Cerf also said that broadcasting, rather than downloading a separate copy to every user, is a good delivery model, and that users will have more control over which ads to watch.
However, obtaining the bandwidth to download a movie in seconds is a problem. Cerf said that the U.S needs policies that will cause more broadband to be rolled out everywhere in country. "We need to have as many broadband solutions as possible to evaluate for cost and deploy in the places where they are most effective," he said.
He added that incentives are needed for investments in infrastructure, and it could entail regulation of some aspects of the Internet in order to assure that there is either competition or fair access to the underlying broadband resources. The U.S. is far behind other countries in its regulatory posture and still very hands off, Cerf said. "As a nostrum, it hasn't worked out very well," he said.
After a few years of waiting, Flickr videos have finally arrived. As a long-time Flickr user, I have been wondering what took so long to add videos (more on Techmeme) to the service. In the meantime, YouTube managed to sprint way ahead, leaving Yahoo Video and the nascent Flickr Video in the dust.
Despite taking the gestation period of an elephant to appear, I like the Flickr Video experience, except for the limitation to 90 seconds of video. It's the video analog of Twitter, which limits users to 140 characters. It's a fine communications constraint, but it doesn't apply as easily to video content.
The addition of video content doesn't disrupt the simplicity and utility of Flickr. It offers the same privacy controls, user interface, licensing options, and comments, captions, tags, APIs, etc.
Flickr videos live along side photos
According to Kakul Srivastava, Flickr's director of product management, Flickr Video is intended to capture the "little moments of life." She told me that the goal was not to invent a new kind of video site or take on YouTube, but to focus on "authentic user-generated and personal content."
"It's not our desire to be biggest site. We are not going after the hour-long wedding videos," she said. "People are taking videos on still cameras and mobile devices, and they are not doing much in terms of sharing videos."
If you compare the number of people posting more commercial videos on sites like YouTube and Yahoo Video, people capturing the little moments is a huge unmet need and taps into existing behaviors, Srivastava added. Users can directly upload videos from their phones. She expects that the addition of video will bring in a new audience, although uploading videos is limited today to paying Flickr users.
"If it means being more conservative out of the gate, that's fine," Srivastava said. "We want to maintain consistency of the feel and experience on Flickr. We don't want to be the biggest video site day one, but the most interesting."
She explained the difference between Yahoo Video (which is the underlying technology for Flickr Video) and Flickr Video as follows: "Yahoo Video is about the broadcast experience, while Flickr is more personal content that you want to share with friends and family...and the world, but it's more personal and authentic." Yahoo will be patrolling Flickr Video and relying on the community to eliminate inappropriate and copyrighted content, she said.
Maintaining the differentiation will be difficult. Users are putting long and short videos on a variety of other sites, including new sites such as Seesmic and Qik. But, the Flickr experience has attracted 25 million active users, and they will appreciate the addition of video.
The 90-second limit on playing time and 150MB maximum file size for upload will encourage users to post their little moments, but it will also be a cause of frustration. For example, I did an interview with Srivastava with my Flip Video camera that was 156 seconds in length. To post it on Flickr I had to go through the pain of editing it, which I would rather avoid for shorter pieces. I expect that the Flickr team and community will think seriously about raising the limit on playing time.
Interview with Kakul Srivastava on Flickr Video--the shorter version:
Interview with Kakul Srivastava on Yahoo Video--the longer version:
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