Rumsfeld's war: watch the full program at PBS.org
This is an extention of my original post at:
mmeiser blog: Rumsfeld's war: watch the full program at PBS.org
I have composed the following feedback on the Windows Media Player format and submitted it to PBS
here.
I am posting it here for comments and feedback. The url is included in my feedback to PBS and I will consider recomposing and resubmitting this feedback if I recieve a worthwhile response in the comments to this post.
Dear Frontline,
I had many problems viewing this excellent Frontline special. As such I write this with some frustration and hope you will seriously consider my proposal.
Why the poorly accessible windows media format? Why not one large mpeg or other open widely supported file format offered via bittorrent. This would not only reduce your costs and increase distribution but would offer a much better experience for your customers. The points are as follows.
- reduce costs - greatly reduce your hosting/bandwidth while still allowing you to track downloads
- improved distribution - greatly increase your potential distribution capacity. Technology like bittorrent will allow you at no cost to quickly scale distribution up to reach a larger audience more quickly while in such scenario a streaming WMP format will collapse and fail under a heavy load frustrating users. See "slashdot effect" on wikipedia.org: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect
- decreased time / cost of publishing - decrease time and cost in digitizing your content as little no cutting or editing need be done and no proprietary software need be used for editing compressing and serving
- improved experience - allow users to watch the video in it's integrity - either on their computer or on their TV or media server as it was meant to be watched without constant clicking or other interactions
- improve usability - allow users to explore the program, skipping around, fast-forwarding, rewinding - an overall better experience
- improve accessibility - allow users with slower or unstable connections to view the content when otherwise they would not
- operating system independent - allow access to users on ALL operating systems, WMP is currently only supported on Windows, with limited support on the Apple / Mac OS.
- increased portability and accessibility - allow users to download content and take it with them to watch at their leisure when they are not online - see "pod casting" on wikipedia.org: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting
- archival issues - take advantage of archival hosting solutions like archive.org to preserve public access to your content over the long term. Win media at least as you have implemented it is not archival.
- possible revenue - keeping content in a complete format will allow you to embed limited sponsorship or other revenue placements as an added value to your sponsors and for your revenue-- i.e. at the end of such an excellent special you might (with a short promotional advert and url) find that people are very willing to donate on your website as both a thank you and a sponsorship of future content of this type.
Please, please, please use an open format. I have provided this feedback a permanent home on my blog to collect comments and feedback at: http://mmeiser.snth.net/blog/2004/10/rumsfelds-war-watch-full-program-at.html
Thank You, Michael Meiser - pbs-org@mmeiser.com
I have already noticed two points I missed.
- author once - no need to author in multiple formats (ie. WMP and Real Video)
- improved compression - new mpeg compression formats are equal to or better than those found in WMP or Real Video
Chicago, IL
