Hello, clever cyber people! I ask of you a question:
What would you do with the material on this site? How would you use it as .... an advertiser? ... a video blogger? ... someone who makes birthday videos for their kid? ... a researcher?
Basically, it's free video material that anyone can manipulate or use. If you wouldn't personally use it, how would you imagine others using it?
What sort of content would make it more appealing for you (or a hypothetical other) to use? More nature footage? More famous people?
Please give me feedback for a project that I'm working on. Anything posted by the week will be very useful, anything posted this month will also help. Thanks!
2 comments:
Interesting. I am not personally very good at video editing on the fly - no time or resources. But I do think this can be useful for amateurs, educational folks. Students could use the material (though they may just rip copyrighted stuff as well). I happened to see one of Lawrence Lessig's last speaches on Creative Commons and I think it is a very useful idea.
There's some great clips here, and I'm all for CCL's but unfortunately I see more obstacles than opportunities.
There's not really enough depth of choices to serve as a good library for someone looking for the right visuals. Google "stock video footage" to get a sense of the huge breadth of subjects & styles available legitimately online for free or cheap.
The low res is a big problem for anyone with a professional use in mind.
Bloggers might be interested, but the problem that it's stuck deep inside the WGBH site. The Digg/delicious links are good, but not going to drive all that much traffic. You need a more reliable way to lure people to them (or are these also posted/linked on other video sharing sites?) Is there a way to tag them with Google keywords? Could you open the library up to user contributions? The driver of sites like Flikr or YouTube is the virtuous cycle of posters who attract more viewers, which attracts more posters, etc.
And finally, video editing is too hard for most people. Did you see the NYT's review of the Flip - a stripped down but easy to use video camera? Technologically, it's a toy. But in less than a year, it's captured 13% market share and become Amazon's top-selling video camera. Why? Because it finally made it simple for the average person to record, download and post a video.
Thoughts on opportunities:
-It's half a solution right now, can you make it a whole one? Is there an easy way for people to use the clips - by embedding them onto their blogs? By adding an editing application on that web page? How could you make it easy enough that Austin could use it (maybe w/supervision, but yes, Austin)?
- Can you use the clips as a way to draw people to the WGBH site? Create a contest on the Open Call section, to use the clips in a new video? Feature a user-created video on the WGBH home page?
-If any advertiser would be interested, it would be ones who (forgive the crassness) want to co-opt people's interest in history or with a need for pre-packaged content. Such as maybe a travel site for the former, or an EZ video-editing software package for the latter.
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