Why is it so hard to put video on the web?

But it’s not! I hear you say.

Well, it’s not hard for me to put video on the web. I could take a video with my N95 and upload it to my blog pretty easily (or you could do it very easily if you have done it 100 times before, which I haven’t, and I must).

But over coffee this morning, friends of mine who work for the public broadcaster were lamenting that it was taking weeks for them to sort out how to put video on the web.

I want to know why. Here’s some of my thoughts – please get in touch with yours!

1. Infrastructure

This is a large, national, multi-platform organisation. One person records the video, another edits it for TV, another uploads it to the web, etc. And they are usually based in different locations (nationally), and may be working different shifts. Lots of different departments need to be involved in any decision about sending video from here to there and on again. Often, they use different systems set up for and purchased by different departments which have different priorities (for example, getting a TV program to air versus getting a website live).

Wow. Suddenly it sounds difficult to get video on the web.

But shouldn’t this large public broadcaster have sorted all this stuff out already? It’s not like the internet just happened.

Yes, but…

2. Resources

It takes resources to fix these things. Money, people, time. Since the early days of the Internet, funding to the public broadcaster has decreased. Yes, at a time when media organisations need to do more, the public broadcaster has received less. That’s a political decision about priorities.

But couldn’t the public broadcaster have made decisions which accounted for changes in technology and audience behaviour, cutting some of the old stuff to make sure it did the new stuff properly? Of course it could have, but…

3. Priorities

It’s not as if there’s no video at all on the website. Some departments have got – or found – the money to get this stuff happening. And some departments have more clout than others, sometimes for good reason.

Problem is, this has led to a whole lot of different solutions across the whole organisation. The big problem still isn’t fixed. Because the big issue (needing national, organisation-wide fixes) isn’t a high enough a priority compared to all the in-your-face, daily, urgent, let’s-just-get-this-site-up-any-way-we-can issues.

Which gets me to…

4. Big ships

It’s one big ship to turn around. Lots of people, lots of processes, lots of audiences.

Problem is, the audience is already facing in the other direction… can the public broadcaster ever catch up?

Hi, it’s me again

OK so clearly, as I said in my last post, there’s ‘not enough time’.

I had relegated this short and rather standard blog to the great pile of blogs that never really get off the ground (perhaps that pile is next to the pile of missing odd socks?).

But, I need to get back to the blog… this time, I think, for slightly different reasons. I won’t go into that any further right now; we’ll see how it unravels.

On one of my all-too-rare visits to The Local recently, a friend and I came up with quite a list of blog post titles. I just can’t let it go. I have to try. And having this year started two blogs which have quickly faded away, I have no fear of failure. It’s the blogosphere. I can – and will – say what I want to when I want to. Or not.

Speak soon. I hope.

Not enough time…

Things to take a look at:

NY Times Facebook Strategy on Poynter

Washington Post on Facebook thanks to howardowns

Nova on Facebook thanks to Bec

Censorship in China on Poynter

Girls on web thanks to Pip

Bebo thanks to Clem

Vimo for sharing videos of the kids with my sister

The radio networks wiki and the digital futures blog

eeeek….

Journalists in Iraq: beautiful multimedia presentation

I am touched and inspired by Reuters’ multimedia presentation on five years of covering Iraq war.

Watch it at http://iraq.reuters.com/

Beautifully presented, it reminds us what journalism can – and should – do. As former Iraq beureau chief Andrew Marshall says in the introduction:

“Covering news in hostile places is a worthwhile thing. It can bring about change, it can inform the world, and it is worth us risking our lives.”

The presentation is a great example of how powerful multimedia story telling can be.

Thanks to poynter.org for bringing this to my attention.

The State of the News Media 2008

I have only just started to digest this massive ‘annual report on American journalism’, but have already found a few interesting nuggets:

“Younger audiences, it turns out, are interested in news. But they want it from new platforms that can deliver it in new ways and on the consumers’ new terms…”

Let’s make sure we get high quality, objective, independent news and analysis out there on these new platforms!!

“The audience for Internet radio has appeared to level off.”

Bunging up radio content on the web just doesn’t seem to cut it any more.

“The most promising element heading into 2008 may be innovation. The news industry now appears to be taking to new technology in earnest… More media sites are taking the reader away from the ‘walled garden’… Citzen media are also growing in ways unmistakable and engaging… And that trend is considered a healthy one by professional journalists, who call on citizens more frequently to inform their reporting.”

This is great. I hope as the news industry takes to new technology and engages with communities in new and exciting ways, they work cooperatively with their colleagues who have been predicting and pushing for these changes for several years, in order to make the most of existing skills and experiences in their organisations.

One more comment: nice formatting. The whole report is easily digested online, but is also easy to print section by section.

Read it here: http://www.stateofthenewsmedia.org/2008/index.php

 

Musicovery: interactive webRadio

I’m really enjoying plugging into Musicovery. I just set my mood and along comes the playlist. If I like a track, I can make it a fave. If not, I can dump it forever. I can choose my music genre too – great for those afternoons where salsa is required. The colour-coded interface works for me too.

Innovations in Journalism conference – online coverage

The European Journalism Centre (a site I’ve just discovered) has good conference coverage pages, including video, photo and text documentation of conferences.

What I found really useful though was their slideshare files, which enabled me to get an overview of the couple of presentations I was interested in… and also to embed them here! (I think…). Yay! That worked.

So… here are a couple of slideshows from the Innovation Journalism conference that I found worth a look.

NPR: what is radio in the digital age?

I’m interested to read that speculation is running hot that the departure of NPR’s CEO Ken Stern is related to his championing of online media.

Word is that NPR affiliates are concerned that the successful distribution of NPR programs via the web (especially podcasts) undermines their value as radio distributors of this content.

If this is true, what a pity that radio broadcasters are still trying to resist the realities of the digital age, instead of getting on board and adapting their businesses to be part of it.

Atticus Mulliken’s article on the European Journalism Centre website provides a good outline of the debate.

Read it here: http://www.ejc.net/magazine/article/whiter_goes_npr/

Time to leave

It’s official.

Sydney is a more expensive place to live than New York.

Read the ABC story here:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/03/18/2192181.htm

Tibet and twitter

The latest episode of the BBC’s Pods and Blogs describes how bloggers are using twitter (or Chinese versions of twitter) are getting around the censors in China and Tibet.

Subscribe to the podcast using this path:

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/fivelive/pods/rss.xml