I'm writing from Cambridge Community Television (http://www.cctvcambridge.org) and we are facing a difficult decision about handling our media and video podcasts and blogs. This stems from a conference based around migrating public access centers from their traditional television channels onto the internet as both technology and social trends change.
The trend we are facing in public access and community media is that more and more of our community members are producing media from their homes (aka blog, vlog, podcast style) and not the traditional method of field production we have been teaching. Our role of teaching technology and providing access to technology is changing, but we intend to remain as a distribution point for our local media.
The new question we are tryng to sort out is where does it make the most sense to store our locally produced media? Does it make the most sense to store media on our own paid web hosting space (we can always pay for services with no Bandwidth meter or cap) or to let the horde of third party (free and commercial) video sites do the storage? We use Drupal as our CMS and there are lots of modules that handle these features in the repository like the video, podcast and acidfree modules, but why should we implement them on our site rather than take advantage of the free (for now) services that exist out there. Here are all the concepts we are trying to keep in consideration:
• What is the most stable, long term, archiveable model?
• Is the trend leaning towards dependency on these third party sites to provide video because bandwidth is so expensive? If so, how far down the road before bandwith is more affordable for video, and there is no need for these extra sites to do the work?
• If we post all of our media on a third party video site and it goes under, where is our media?
• What if that third party is bought, sold, etc. Then what?
• Some sites, Google and Blogger included, take ownership of your content as soon as you post it.
• When will those sites start to stick commercials at the start of each hosted video?
• If we host our own, we may face greater hosting fees. What financial tipping point will push us to a decision?
• Third party services only handle short videos, like YouTube that maxes out at 10 minutes, but we have long format media.
Some of the sites that we know our community is commonly using are:
http://www.youtube.com
http://www.blip.tv
http://video.google.com
http://www.blogger.com
http://www.archive.org
http://www.ourmedia.org
We certainly want the answer to point to hosting it ourselves like we have for years, but we also want to make the best long term decision and our old habits might not be the best way.
Thanks for your time and thoughts! Look over our site if you have a moment.
Sean Effel
Cambridge Community Television
http://www.cctvcambridge.org
Comments
Not to mention...
I didn't even mention the paid commercial services rolling out this year by companies like Akamai and Brightcove which are positioning to be some of the first TV over IP providers on the web. While it will certainly make sense for commercial content providers to pay for this content delivery method, it is not likely that small non-profits in the community television world will be able to afford their services.
Btw, Brightcove has a free demo of their commercial service package which you can try out right now, its good until the end of August. http://www.brightcove.com
Sean
Cambridge Community Television
http://www.cctvcambridge.org
Always Pay To Store Valuable Media
This is a very tough decision for folks on a tight budget because there are a lot of options that look very appealing when considering all of the free options out there. In my opinion free services are not a good option for primary archiving for the following reasons:
a. The typical free agreement includes the right by the service to use your content in any way they want to promote their service without compensating you for the contribution. There's always a 'quid pro quo' when you get something for free.
b. They have no legal obligation to continue storing your media. So if YouTube gets bought, gets sued or goes under you may lose some or all of your content.
c. Free services typically make no warranty on the reliability or speed of content delivery. So you get what you get and have no recourse if your media is not available or is delivered in an inefficient manner.
That said, there's nothing wrong with archiving to multiple services to protect yourself against such issues.
As far as the individual services are concerned my thoughts are these:
YouTube - They don't offer downloads in any format other than flash, so unless your primary media format is flash then you're not really archiving when you use YouTube. YouTube does have a free 'director account' level that allows you to post videos longer than 10 minutes.
Blip.tv - Their service is good but I'm not sure who is paying the bills or how long this service will be around.
Google Video - What are the odds of Google going under or getting sold? With their market cap I'd say 1000 to 1. Google Video also transcodes video into several formats so you have access to download real media files.
Blogger - As far as I know Blogger doesn't host video although you can embed video from other sites into Blogger pages.
Archive.org - I believe this is a project that will be around for a long, long time. Problem is that it is notorious for being glacially slow to deliver media.
OurMedia - OurMedia is simply a front end for Archive.org. So when you submit to OurMedia the media goes to Archive.org. Once again, they are notorious for upload problems and slow delivery.
All in all I would say it' s worth it to use one of these services to share and distribute media while investing in a paid host or storage on DVD as the first line of defense in case your data needs to be restored.
Rob Safuto
Media Master
http://www.podcastnyc.net
http://www.musicbuggy.com
Excellent advice
You get what you pay for. The free services are great for enhancing distribution, but not for archiving. (Even GMail has been known to delete email accounts without a blink.)
One thing you can consider is setting up a media server account -- something you can do even on shared hosting, where they give you lots of bandwidth and storage. These days, the bite in shared hosting seems to be in database-driven services, but basic http storage can be a lot smoother. And these services typically provide for periodic backups of your site.
If you have more money, or time, the real thing to do would be to archive the video in an uncompressed format (not DVD, which is very lossy mpeg-2, but something like QT uncompressed, where you have a clean master that can be used for future formats yet to be invented or released), and then have various compressed formats for distribution from your main site, a media server, the free services or a combination of them all.
Laura
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design, snap, blog
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Laura Scott :: design » blog » tweet
Short Answer: Do both. Host
Short Answer: Do both. Host it yourself, and mirror it on bigger name central sites.
Long Answer:
I agree with podcastnyc. If you care about the data, host it yourself. However, from a purely distribution point of view, it makes sense to hook up your data to a big site and mirror your content. Not only will it enter your content into larger distribution networks, it serves as a mirror to your own data, in case your own site goes down. The more mirrored your site is, the better, in my opinion. But definitely the worst is relying *soley* on third-party, free hosting providers since as others have mentioned, their policies can change at any time.
Amazon s3 is an easy way to host media
I did media project using Amazon's s3 service to host my video. This way we maintained complete control of the media while not having to deal with the costs and headaches of managing media servers. I wrote up a description of how I did it with drupal here: http://www.tunaspecial.com/?p=162
Ownership
Does Amazon get permission to reuse the media? Did you have to sacrifice partial ownership? I can't imagine Amazon would operate that service for free with no hitches, they have shareholders to answer to...
Cost
Should have looked before I commented, Amazon charges real money for this service: 15 cents per hosted GB and 20 cents per transferred GB.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=16427261
Any further thoughts or news?
Your site is fantastic: http://www.cctvcambridge.org !!!
It looks like you are storing video on your server and not off-site?
I am looking to be able to store large media (audio and video) off of our server to save costs, ideally at ourmedia.org (archive.org).
Looking for some way to upload media from within our Drupal site to another storage site. I imagine that may require some kind of API from ourmedia.org (or whoever is used for storage). It has to be free for us, so that is limiting.
This was discussed in this thread also: http://drupal.org/node/57017
Thanks for any advice on this.
Thanks very much!
Thanks very much!
Indeed we are hosting on our own server space, we're a little touchy about who owns our media so we decided to do it ourselves.
Try getting in touch with the developer of video.module, the user name is Fax8. He did some custom work on his video module that met some specific needs of ours and if your suggestions are in line with his vision of this module then you might very well convince him to make changes you need. Maybe adding in some sort of upload destination chooser that would store account info for other locations (like ourmedia or internet archive) and present you with an option of where you want the file uploaded when you create a new video node.
I should also say, if you are from an organization with even a small amount of money to spend, paying the developer helps get your needs met - and makes it possible for the rest of the community to benefit from the development as well. Thats how this open source stuff works.
Sean
Cambridge Community Television
http://www.cctvcambridge.org