Obama appoints YouTube (Google) as secretary of video
Updated at 11 a.m. to clarify that the change.gov site with the YouTube video of the Obama's radio address has text links to the same video on AOL, MSN, and Yahoo. YouTube still has premier position as the secretary of video...
It's great that President-elect Barack Obama is delivering his regularly scheduled Saturday address in both audio and video form. After using the Internet to help him get elected and connect with younger voters, it's clear that his team will continue to exploit the media to deliver its messages and stimulate dialog.
Obama has chosen to upload the video of his Saturday address to Google's YouTube, by far the most dominant video-sharing service, and embed the video on his Change.gov transition site.
The video has already garnered more than 500,000 views, and this is just the beginning of the Obama's administration's use of video. Post-inauguration, there will likely be a White House YouTube channel to push the administration's agenda and to hopefully to provide more transparency.
My question is why favor YouTube? It's obvious that YouTube is the way to reach the most people. According to Nielsen Online's VideoCensus, Google's service served 5.35 billion video streams in September 2008. Yahoo, the closest competitor, had 264 million.
But why should the incoming president, or public official, favor one Internet video service over another? Yahoo, MSN, Blip, Veoh, and other video-sharing sites shouldn't have to lobby the White House for equal time or at least some time. I am sure the choice of YouTube was practical, and has nothing to do with Google CEO Eric Schmidt's very public support of Obama.
Implicit product endorsements are difficult to avoid for any public official. If Obama prefers a BlackBerry, Apple can't do much to fix that problem. But, Obama is rarely seen in pictures with his Blackberry and The New York Times reports that he is going to have to give up his favorite communications device.
In the case of uploading video, the Obama team can create its own branded, video-sharing service neutral video player that allows anyone in the world to embed the content. That might be a more equitable way for Obama to spread his message, and he could still have a YouTube channel.
(Credit: change.gov)
Dan Farber is editor in chief of CBS Interactive News, which includes CBSNews.com and CNET News. He has more than 25 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. E-mail Dan.
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The problem with your posts Dan is I am never sure when to credit you with a keen sense of irony! Schmidt is now one of the man's economic advisors! If Schmidt has Obama's ear, where do you THINK Obama is going to feed his videos?
Week 2 400,000 views
Week 3 300,000 views
....
Week 40 25,000 views (whoops, I clicked the wrong link, otherwise 50 views)
Obama has already shown that the "change" was simply a moniker to get elected. Obviously the same old thing. Bail out this guy, bail out that guy. Stimulation bills. It's unbelievable. Stimulate me with good actions, not more of the same old junk.
The tone that Obama is trying to set as he prepares to assume office (and the subject of this article) is that he intends to continue to leverage those platforms that helped him secure the majority of America's votes to ensure greater transparency of the Whitehouse.
The subject of this debate - in case that went over the top of your head - is how does he achieve that without implicitly endorsing one video site over another. The question that you need to address yourself to is whether the fact that YouTube streamed over 20 times as many videos as its nearest rival, Yahoo should be a factor in determining how best to reach the greatest number of people as efficiently as possible.
He is the charisma king. His followers will hang on his every word, no matter what he says. "Change" was the key word that he picked to get himself elected after his Obama-nutwork used crowd psychology in a successful "hate Bush" campaign. His campaign used lies, manipulation, and psychology to create a following of brain-dead young "wannabe part of history" lemmings.
The only "change" that this wolf in sheep's clothing will bring will be a forced change of lifestyle to further his "climate change" agenda. If climate change exists (and that is a most redundant label since the climate changes all the time) then why isn't there any cheap beachfront property available? If this man is going to tax only the rich, why are there so many rich who support him? Because they love to pay high taxes?
So many questions, so few clear-cut answers, and a weekly video is just ensuring that the dopes stay hope-notized.
Not to mention, if he's as savy about tech as we think, he'd surely know this isn't going to stay on Youtube alone. Power of the People and all that.
Didn't you answer your own question by stating that YouTube is the most popular video sharing site? Why should Obama have his team put time and money into developing his own "branded video sharing service" when it makes more sense to take advantage of something that is already available, easily accessible, and well known? I think it's a very smart move to take advantage of existing technology to maintain transparency and stay in touch with the public. Obama is already proven that he's tech savvy and knows how to use the current media technology, so why not keep that going?
because he made a point of it during his campaign thats why.
and to the author of this content, he has created his own branded site, its called "www.change.gov" and I'm sure he uses youtube simply because of the ease of embedding said video's onto his own website.
... or, lets just create another branch of government that creates and manages online video's...
Anyway, this is the first thing I thought of when I read about the announcement. YouTube's quality is awful and features are lacking compared to some of the competition.
Now that the man is president everyone can go back to not caring about politics anyway. I'm not sure this will attract THAT many new viewers to YouTube.
Have you visited change.gov to watch the video?
I immediately noticed links for AOL, Yahoo and MSN on the same page as the YouTube video.
I could watch the video on a non-YouTube site IF I CHOSE TO DO SO!
I do not usually write that an author is an idiot but I am so very close to doing so this time.
Doesn't it give a clue that things may really change at White House? Choosing youtube gives a good clue about "not inventing the wheel again" attitude.
If you look at IBM Mainframe (Z10 etc.) pages, you will be amazed that IBM, the Big Blue, Mainframe division also makes use of Youtube. That is the company who coded java 1.1 mpeg 4 decoder years ago.
Artists started to offload their videos to Youtube too.
The issue there could be: Privacy risks. It shouldn't be posted to any site with any kind of tracking technology. If you mention MSN and as this is CNET, people can get the idea wrong. People are really tired of MS and Silverlight "I want to play too!" childish behaviour.
All services you mention carry huge privacy risks. It is not MSN, Youtube, AOL thing. Just look at how much data had to be handed to MTV (Viacom) for video tracking data Google had in their hands.
Yahoo solved that issue on health.yahoo.com , which has an entirely separate, almost paranoid friendly privacy and cookie policy.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/15/aol-gets-out-of-user-generated-video-business/
wot, at taxpayers expense? No thanks.
"why not just post the video to all the services" again, at who's time and expense?
what's your real problem with this Farber? Obviously this isn't like the old days when someone could have a press conference and the media just shows up with their own cameras. But, maybe media outlets should be allowed to film the weekly video as well, and convert/upload the videos to their respective outlets (i.e. MSNBC, CNN, etc)
As computers go, most people are plain end-users. Politicians are even more so.
They use whatever they know and whatever is available to them. And as you have pointed yourself YT is most popular video resource right now.
You complain can be rephrased as whines from small local TV station that somebody doesn't want to give them interview because their are too small. When big shot politicians show up exclusively on huge networks - CNN/MSNBC/Fox/etc - this isn't viewed as "endorsement" somehow. Same here: YT is a TV for Web age.
Yahoo? Yahoo could be Youtube if they didn't insist on windows media format for ages. By the time they went Flash (and very wrongly used Quicktime), Youtube has already became standard.
Ideally, a President should give mpeg 2 (for media), mpeg 4 (for consumers) and straight mpeg 1 videos of his speech from a .gov site without cookies, tracking. I am not saying .ogg etc. type of things. MPEG is a documented, vendor neutral, OS neutral standard.
He should also check the NASA folks. Looks like MS bought them too, Windows Media there. Excellently working Real stream which could handle millions has been hidden. I count months before they get the stupid idea of Silverlight thanks to some MS exec lunch.
At least this is a good start. I don't recall any other president reaching out
to the public.
What is clear to me is Washington never has understood that choosing the front runner almost always means favoring a monopolist or other hegemon in tech. Washington NEEDS to understand tech markets but may never.
But again -- it may be there is a quid pro quo here. We'll likely never know -- and that means this White House needs to bend over backwards to avoid bad appearances.
I seriously hope that the transition team will quickly seek out the participation of the Deaf community in leadership roles so that these kind of things won't happen.
In case the transition team is on the lookout for blog comments - here is the link to the YouTube captioning information.
http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=100077&cbid=-73sa13ue7dkp&src=cb&lev=answer
It appears all of the major video sites either have captioning capability now or are in the process of being able to offer it.\
http://www.hearingexchange.com/blogs/?p=75
To reach the most amount of people with the least amount of effort sounds fine to me. Not to mention who gives a **** if it wasn't posted on every other video site ever; you mention 4 others but there are many many others that in your logic should also be included; how about we include youporn also just to cover our *****.
Anyone can link to youtube; get over it.
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by Jonathan
November 16, 2008 9:43 PM PST
- We'll ignore the fact that Obama was using YouTube WAY before he got the nomination and WAY before he got the thumbs up from Google's CEO. Bah! Facts. Who needs em.
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See all 34 Comments >>And I would say why not use Youtube. If Obama stays neutral guess where the money comes from for said neutral video player? That's right. Tax payer dollars. Now if Obama was to go to all the video services and say guys. I want to carry this weekly address on all your services and you foot the bill...that is another matter.
Again this comes down to being practical. YouTube is the king right now. Use the service that gets the most hits. Its as simple as that.