Communal pressure

One of the expansion platforms we've been considering for awhile at KUAM has been user-submitted video via the web. We've pioneered community images with our Familiar Faces service, but times change and static images fall inferior to moving video. We got the ball rolling before MySpace hit, so we had a fostered a thriving community before social networking was an actual term people glommed onto.

In short, management is becoming down with the YouTube movement, and wants to assimilate.

Keeping with the open source tenet of building on someone else's ingenuity, I find it hard to compete with YouTube, Vimeo - being the gold standard for viral video delivery, anything we custom build, no matter how integrated, will be comparably inferior. So during a meeting I was asked what, architecturally speaking, we'd need to incorporate user-submitted video. "Money, time, server space, memory," I simply replied. I built a .NET transport prototype that facilitates people submitting most major video formats from the usual range of devices (PCs, phones, PDAs), but it's a sticky wicket. We'll probably do it, though.

Many stations are conceding ultimate technical and marketing control and just building YoutTube channels. We've done the same thing. Twice, in fact.