Disappearing Edwards Videos – One Case for Brightcove
June 18, 2007 by Jeremy
Filed under 2008 Presidential, Edwards, Obama
On Technology Evangelist, Benjamin J. Higginbotham…
…which reminds me of a story – my only known encounter with the CIA!…
…but anyway…
Higginbotham writes on the value of using Brightcove as opposed to YouTube for your campaign’s primary video outlet. While rightly suggesting the use ofall of the social video sites (including Blip.tv, Revver and Ustream.TV), he sites one major strength of Brightcove…the ability to post your videos on a time-delayed basis:
Being able to pre-record a message and schedule it to go live at an exact time can give your campaign the extra edge it may need vs waiting for YouTube to convert your video whenever it darn well pleases. (Technology Evangelist)
He is absolutely right. Brightcove has better control and quality – and the simple convenience of choosing your own thumbnail (long overdue from YouTube). But, in a world where timing is so critical imagine the stress relief of uploading on Monday, knowing that the video will appear – as if by magic! – at a predetermined time on Thursday!
One campaign wishing it had this ability may be the Edwards campaign – who have been cranking out videos lately…with some of them disappearing after they pop to those of us using RSS to monitor their feeds.
If you click on the player above, you find that the video has been turned private. But not before it turned up in my feed reader – and on the blog of Jeff Jarvis, PrezVid. Did Jarvis’ snark drive this video into privacy?
Another example popped up in my reader not long ago, going hand in hand with a push email the Edwards camp is making today urging people to demand him on Eventful.com.
The video has now been removed, but the cat is out of the bag. When will the clip reappear?
I suppose the moral of the story is that while YouTube is the biggest microphone in the online video world it has it’s drawbacks. So, consider Brightcove (or Blip.tv – which the Obama campaign has recently added…you can get Obama on iTunes now!). You’ll get better quality, more control, the ability to choose your still – YouTube really needs to fix this! – and the restful knowledge that you will control when people see your clips…not the unreliable speed of YouTube’s upload system.
I’ve been a big advocate of Blip.tv over YouTube in my circles because of the improved quality, choice of formats, podcast enclosure support, and Creative Commons licensing. However, my YT-prone cohorts come back at me with the extreme ease of copying the embed code from a YT video you find in someone else’s blog (either copy it directly from the new & improved YT player or click the player to get to the root YT page), whereas there’s almost no way for a viewer of a Blip video on a blog to find the originating page from which to copy their own embed. As far as virality goes (crucial to a campaign), YT wins there; Blip needs to catch up (they say they’re improving their player to be more like YT’s). How is Brightcove on that?
Another service that could be handy for campaigns is something like Crowdabout.us, which allows for time-associated tags/comments to be attached to a video, giving us bookmarks to click to a particular issue that matters to us rather than wading through 20 minutes of stump speech. Any other bookmarking services for videos?
I like Blip a lot, too.
As for ease of embedding, Brightcove has a pair of buttons (not unlike YouTube) which can copy to your clipboard either the link or the embed code for whatever you are watching.
No campaign should leave out YouTube. Like so many others say, you have to go where the people are. It’s like canvassing. You don’t walk sparsely populated areas…you walk dense ones. YouTube is the Manhattan of online video density.
I was actually quite befuddled by the Clinton “Sopranos” video this morning, because it took so damn long to see it on YouTube, where it could have been flourishing all day.
The biggest problem I see in the off the shelf distribution channels is the inability to put your own post-roll click-through links. Having that capability could better use the video as the hook, and offer a course of action to pursue at the end.
Because – as great as the Sopranos video is – these pieces are not about cinema…they’re about organizing action to win an election.