So I have a green light on the time code feature and I am sending an email to goldy to ask for feature suggestions before I get this up on our website. So rally the bloggers brains and let’s make this a cool functional and open feature of tvw.org! I will be working from a beta this coming week and I will get you a link so some folks can test it. I am hoping for 2 weeks from Monday for a launch.
He also says that the original way you could embed videos from TVW wasn’t pulled down because of security or copyright issues, but because it wasn’t efficient enough:
The embed code was not pulled consciously; it was a mere effect of an upgrade that benefits everyone since it allowed us to increase the capacity for streams. We fully intended to get you all back to it. As a matter of fact we have been working hard at getting this ready.
I trust Scott enough to know that’s what actually happened, but when his executive director starts sending out emails for folks to take down videos, sure I was a bit paranoid that they’d taken down the secret squirrel way to post videos.
Stateline.org recently posted a story about state legislators who blog and included links to about 60 or so. But there aren’t any listed from Washington.
According to TVW’s 2006 Annual Report, 18 percent of their funding comes from the state of Washington. That more than $2 million state appropriation is off-set by just less than $10 million in in-kind contributions — the balance is the free access to cable air-waves the channel enjoys.
TVW is a 501 (c)(3) non-profit corporation, not a government agency. It is governed by an independent board of directors. The majority of TVW’s operating cash – approximately $2.5 million per year – comes from the Legislature via a contract-for-service through the Secretary of State. TVW receives more than $11 million per year in the form of in-kind contributions of channel space from Washington’s cable television industry.
I for one am super-super happy we give money to TVW. Heck, I think we should give more, maybe three times as much a year. TVW is one of the greatest things we spend money on in this state.
But, on the other hand, if they operate on the public dime, we should be able to question their silly copyright that keeps the public at arms length from what they’re doing with our money.
Here’s another point: their most cherished asset is the “gavel-to-gavel” coverage they provide of the state legislature and the state supreme court. Those cameras and audio taping equipment are housed permanently in public facilities. We give TVW more access to our public proceedings than we give any other entity. Even if we didn’t pay $2 million plus to keep TVW going, we should have a say what happens to recordings of our public proceedings.
All that said, I still understand why they’re nervous about letting go of what they consider their content. They feel like they’re beholden to elected officials, and if those electeds feel like TVW is becoming a content-supplier for attack ads, the legislature would be less likely to fund TVW.
I don’t want to point out the obvious, but those elected officials are beholden to the voting public who might have a different opinion about who should have what kind of access to TVW content.
Emmet,.. I know for a fact (from a creditable source) that the embedding option was not pulled intentionally. TVW changed to a server based delivery technology to be able to serve a larger audience and the code for how they embed their code changed. It was a technical issue only. Embedding is coming to TVW.org soon, very soon….
Does Sdf=Scott Freeman? If so, he’d be a credible source in and of himself. And, a nice guy if memory serves.
Okay Sdf (Scott), get us some embedding. And, don’t break your back trying to get that time parameter thing working. Embedding first.
American political realignments seem to come approximately every 40 years, and they dub the alternating political generations “idealist” and “civic.” In case you’ve been on Mars, we’re in one right now.
“The members of ‘idealist’ generations strongly adhere to their own personal values and are unlikely to compromise what they consider to be fundamental questions of right and wrong,” the authors write. “Realignments fueled by ‘idealist’ generations, of which the Baby Boomers are the most recent example, therefore, result in decades of political gridlock, atrophy in governmental institutions, and an inability to resolve big societal and political issues and problems.
One way to think about Millennials, in comparison to the two generations that preceeded them, is to picture a generational cohort made up solely of Harry Potter and his friends then compare those bright-eyed, overachieving wizards with the adults at Hogwarts, who try to mold their upbringing for good or ill.
…(the Harry Potter series) shows Harry and his team working hard to do their best within the rules set for them to follow and, of course, using their own special ingenuity to save the world whenever necessary.
Baby boomers are the teachers and directors at Hogwarts — everyone of them individualistic, judgemental egotists who talk more than they act. A few characters such as Hagrid, not in power but always around to try to help, despite less-than-perfect pasts, represent Generation X, the unlucky group sandwiched between two dynamic and dominating generations.
…media moguls, authors, and even politicans make the fundemental error of thinking that today’s young people think and act just like they did when they were young. Nothing could be further from the truth
TVW would like its coverage to be distributed as widely as possible, but they don’t want it to appear like they are responsible for editing or excerpting their raw footage. We bloggers, on the other hand, can’t very well illustrate our commentary by inserting a link with an instruction to, say, scroll to the 52 minute mark.
To accommodate both our needs, TVW is working on a technical solution: a flash player that we can embed into our posts—like YouTube—but with a contiguous time sequence as an optional parameter. We get an easier way to select and present pertinent excerpts, and TVW assures the integrity of their coverage by serving it themselves.
Yes, the “contiguous time sequence as an optional parameter” would be interesting, but its hardly an excuse not to make already existing flash files hosted on the TVW servers embeddable.
That said, I’ll be happy when they get this done. It will make their products much more useful.
Every time I drive up Capital Boulevard (which is funny since it’s actually south and I equate going up with going north) and by the old brewery I see the land in between where the railroad tracks head toward the river and over to the Valley Athletic Club I think that it would be a perfect spot for a soccer stadium. How cool would it be to take the bus on a Saturday afternoon over here, donning a jersey and joining several thousand other Olympia fans as we cheer on our local team to promotion. I am not asking for much, just something along the lines of Fratton Park in Portsmouth or Fulham’s Craven Cottage.
I have the same sort of thoughts Matt does.
So, in that vein, I give you Deschutes Park (version one and two), home of Tumwater AFC.
This is upper-division Tumwater AFC’s home from the north. In this reality, Tumwater AFC plays in this world’s American version of League 1, always playing for promotion to the MLS where they can play the Seattle Sounders.
This is lower division Tumwater AFC’s stadium from the south. They probably play somewhere in this reality’s North American version of the Northern Premier League. Semi-pro, but still good.
1. Put someone in charge. This is something completely different than what you’ve usually been doing. Even though you’ve had a robust website for years, it operates as if its a website for a TV network (which obviously it is). There is no interactive content, no blogs, no sharable video or audio, just streaming video that is almost impossible to capture and share. There are some podcasts (that I enjoy weekly) and I can download a slug of mp3s, but these aspects of the site are aimed at simply providing the content, not really at facilitating the sharing of it.
So, you have to think about this not as part of a a TV network, but rather as a website in and of itself. At a certain point, TVW will actually be more of a website than a TV network. I already don’t watch TVW at all. I am on a dish, and most of my TV is recorded from a DVR anyway. But, I would consider myself a TVW addict, but solely through the website. Putting someone in charge of “online communities” can be a good start.
2. Don’t put everything into a social media format, at first. Start yourself off slow, let the person in charge of your online social stuff pick and choose (and have suggested to them) content that can be put out there as shareable. And, encourage conversation online. There is a real need for somewhere in Washington State politics, outside of newspapers and blogs, for people to come together and talk. TVW has the unique and powerful potential to quickly become this place.
3. Remember the kind of double standard that already exists between the “news media” and citizens using your content. It already kind of miffs me that in your copyright you carve out an exception for bona fide news broadcasters, and as more people get used to being able to share video and audio, more people will get miffed at this double standard. More and more, we are the media.
Also, Mark Gardner can only think about this issue in terms of partisanship and a congressional race. What really is at issue here is a pretty old distrinction between “bona fide” media and the rest of us.
While some folks may want to continue to believe that there is a difference between folks who write and folks who write, there really isn’t.
Mark, you’re a blogger now. Not “bona fide.” Do you think if this was Darcy Burner saying something silly you wouldn’t want to post it. Well, maybe not, but I would want you to be able to, and I’d rather vote for her.
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