We are looking for the holy grail – a method to take a file and have it sent AUTOMATICALLY to our website and to our channel, transcoded into the proper formats (mpeg2 and flash respectively). Otherwise we just struggle to sustain.

I was wondering if your community saw online video distribution as a way to promote your access center and increase membership – thus, helping to justify use of resources (franchise fees, etc.)?

We use Blip.tv for our online video needs. This also includes using upperblip which is a stand alone applications that allows us to post multiple videos at one time. We do not have a pro account, just a regular account. We try and keep our videos online under 10 minutes.

2. What was your motivation for choosing this platform?

I chose Blip because I have been using it for a long time and I find it very easy to use. I like the flash encoding and the cross posting to the Internet Archive. The support is great and the company keeps innovating and taking its users along for the ride.

I also feel like Blip,tv respects the small independent voice.

However, there are two other local station who have different online strategies that both have some merit.

Nortontv.org use Brightcove as their all in one online player solution. It is a package and I like that element. I am pretty sure they can have videos of any length.

Attleboro Community Access
http://doubleacs.com/
hosts the video themselves. They do all the flash encoding themselves and it allows them to have videos of any length.

3. Is this platform participatory (is it a videoblog, etc.)? If so, do you offer an RSS feed?

Yes, sure does:
http://medfieldtv.blip.tv/rss

4. What metadata schemes are you using? Meaning, how do you tag your videos?

Currently, we tag our videos with the name of our community “medfield”, the name of our organization “medfieldtv” and “pegtv”

5. What difficulties are you finding in using, or teaching your producers about, these online video platforms?

The community in which I serve is very tech savvy. I have middle school kids who come in and want to write php scripts for our website. Justifying the teaching of it is harder than the teaching itself. We have to justify it because there is a perception that community television should be about, well, local, community, television – and if you want to be serious about that – there are conflicts with local online video production. There is a fear of quality issues, of losing the local because of the nature of the web and of misappropriating our franchise fees or abandoning our television channel. These are the sort of ideological obstacles I am working through.

6. What has the response been from your community?

As mentioned above, the response has been varied. It depends on how people currently picture community media. The video idea has a lot of teeth among the young folks but I feel like even some of the people with Direct TV appreciate our online video offerings. For the most part though, the online video is secondary to our channel at this point.

7. Has there been any positive impact or social change that has resulted from using a web video platform at your center?

Nothing exceptional yet.