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Web video is now everywhere. It has moved beyond the borders of YouTube into an essential part of most high traffic websites. Even traditional print publishers like the New York Times have joined the video revolution.
NGOs need to be cautious about becoming too video dependent. Despite the high annual broadband growth rate, according to the latest OECD statistics from June 2007, in most developed countries only a fifth to a quarter of the population subscribe to broadband Internet access at home, and the percentage is, of course, much lower in poorer countries.
But the people who do have broadband access are the affluent, influential trend setters. Moreover, the real problem for most NGOs is not too much video but rather that they maintain text-heavy sites with little to appeal to the broadband generation.
The most savvy NGOs long ago learned to open up their websites far beyond press releases and to allow their staff and supporters to maintain blogs and comment on content. You can get a lot more content, and often more timely, relevant and interesting content, from staff and supporters than could ever be produced by dedicated web editors or press officers.
Mobile phones are the key to extending the idea of supporter-created content into web video. Unlike digital video cameras, which are often expensive and require several steps to convert, resize and upload web video, supporters can use mobile phones to take video clips and upload them to web sites within minutes. Moreover, the size, compression and increasingly the quality of mobile phone video clips are perfect for the web.
Radagast Solutions has helped several NGOs produce sites focused on supporter-created video clips, including Greenpeace UK's Stop Heathrow and the Northern Ireland Youth Forum's Ten Pounds Worth of Change. Stop Heathrow has been running since November and now has more than 700 video clips. Ten Pounds Worth of Change is gradually building up and should be officially launched by the end of January. Both campaigns have roving volunteers using mobile phones to interview supporters and upload the clips, as well as accepting clips directly from the public.
Supporter-created video sites must solve four technical problems: uploading, transcoding, moderation and display. The Radagast Solutions get_multimedia module deals with all four issues.
get_multimedia provides three ways for supporters to upload videos: email (either directly from the mobile phone or desktop), the iTagg 60300 shortcode system (popular in the UK), or a regular web upload form. Clips arriving through all three methods are recorded in a multimedia_uploads table in a MySQL database and placed together for further processing in an uploads directory on the web server.
The Radagast Solutions get_multimedia module uses the popular ffmpeg program to resize and convert video from a variety of common formats, including mp4, wmv, ati, mov and 3gp, into the FLV format used by Flash. By default video is converted into the 176x144 size supported by most mobile phones. Both a 176x144 still image and a smaller thumbnail are extracted for use by the video display system.
Supporters who upload video clips through the web form or by email receive an acknowledgment email message with a link to the clip once it is trancoded and displayed on the site. Supporters who use shortcode optionally receive an SMS acknowledgment.
Site administrators can optionally receive an email message or SMS notification for every clip uploaded. They can then review the clip, and optionally delete it, edit its subject line, or give it a higher priority.
Site visitors can also report problem clips to a site administrator.
Supporter-created video sites may have hundreds or even thousands of clips and there needs to be a good way to view all this content. The get_multimedia module uses a Flash video wall to display the thumbnails of many clips at once, with a mouse hover showing the details of each clip. If there are priority clips set, these are always displayed on first page of the video wall and a priority clip is played when someone visits the page.
The video wall application is typically tailored extensively for each Radgast Solutions client to properly brand it and to fit into the client site design.
The get_multimedia module allows visitors to search for video clips, email them to friends, report problem clips, and optionally rate them and comment on them.
get_multimedia requires a dedicated Linux server and Elgg 0.8 or higher. Some get_multimedia installations (such as Stop Heathrow) simply use Elgg to provide a login for the video administrator to manage clips. Others (such as Ten Pounds Worth of Change) use Elgg to register supporters, to rate and comment on clips, and to draw participants into a larger social network.
Radagast Solutions can arrange a dedicated server and set up all required software if you are interested in integrating supported-created video clips into your website.
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