Whole of
Government
Video
Service
Scoping
Study
Advice and
Recommendations for
a Centralised
Government Video
Service
Jimi Bostock
Dr Silvia Pfeiffer, John Ferlito
Vquence Pty Limited
Report prepared for:
2009 Whole of Government Video Service
PROJECT: WHOLE OF GOVERNMENT VIDEO SERVICE SCOPING STUDY
BACKGROUND
Government agencies have produced a substantial amount of videos over the years that can help
people in their interaction challenges with government, become aware of new initiatives, or access
general news and other information. These videos tend to be buried within agency sites or are not
online.
Gov2.0 is about making information more accessible to citizens. Video buried in agency sites is not as
accessible as it can be. Exposure for those videos can be achieved through a centralised government
video service which provides video publishing services to agencies and serves as a government video
portal for centralised public access to videos from agency sites / libraries.
Such a centralised video service will provide improved access through video searchability. It will
provide uniform handling of videos across agencies, e.g. with uniform metadata (title, description,
tags, categories). If can further provide a uniform ability to e.g. crowd source captions and audio
annotations. In general, accessibility will be improved.
SCOPE
Provide advice and recommendations in the form of a scoping study for the viability of a centralised
government video service for use by government departments and agencies based on local and
international best practices.
OBJECTIVES

Identify local and international best practice models.

Provide analysis of relevant models that could be used to implement a centralised video service
for government agencies, including infrastructure, bandwidth, copyright and compliance
requirements.

Provide a high level cost benefit and risk analysis for viable build vs. buy models.
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SCOPING STUDY
This proposal is for the preparation of a report that includes recommendations for a centralised
government video service, which would be used by government agencies to publish video content
and which could live at video.gov.au.
The study will include an analysis of current best practices by government and other organisations in
Australia and overseas.
The study will also include a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of different technical
approaches such as video channel on a mass market service, a hosted service on a commercial
provider, a custom solution based on an open source system, or propriety software developed for
the solution.
Issues that are relevant to the analysis of technical solutions include but are not limited to:

functionality of the solutions,

discoverability, including the level of indexing of associated metadata and SEO,

development / deployment cost,

service reliability,

infrastructure cost,

bandwidth cost,

copyright and licensing implications,

accessibility requirements,

longevity requirements,

other government compliance requirements,

level of control over form of publication.
The existing analysis by AGIMO concerning the upsides and downsides of working with YouTube,
http://webpublishing.agimo.gov.au/Using_YouTube, will be included in the study.
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2009 Whole of Government Video Service
CONTENTS
1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
7
AGENCIES
7
BEST PRACTICE
7
RECOMMENDATIONS
8
2.
9
FRAMING
ONLINE VIDEO – SETTING THE SCENE
9
BROAD ISSUES
10
APS SPECIFIC ISSUES
11
STATE OF TECHNOLOGY
12
CONCLUSION
14
3. BEST PRACTICE
15
INTRODUCTION
15
WHY HASN’T IT BEEN DONE BEFORE
15
INDIVIDUAL AGENCY BEST PRACTICE
15
EXPERIMENTAL BEST PRACTICE
21
4. APS ONLINE VIDEO LANDSCAPE
22
INTRODUCTION
22
APS VIDEO PRODUCTION
22
ISSUES
28
GROWING DESIRE
29
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CONCLUSIONS
29
5. PROPOSED VIDEOS
31
INSTRUCTIONAL VIDEOS
31
OTHER VIDEOS
31
CURRENT VIDEO OPPORTUNITIES
31
6. FIRST RECOMMENDATIONS
33
7. REQUIREMENTS ON TECHNOLOGY
34
INTRODUCTION
34
OVERVIEW: GENERAL FUNCTIONALITY
34
PRODUCTION-RELATED REQUIREMENTS
35
PUBLISHING-RELATED REQUIREMENTS
36
SEARCHABILITY-RELATED REQUIREMENTS
37
ARCHIVING-RELATED REQUIREMENTS
38
PUBLICITY-RELATED REQUIREMENTS
39
8. MODELS OF IMPLEMENTATION
41
INTRODUCTION
41
OVERVIEW OF MODELS
41
VIDEO PUBLISHING PLATFORMS
41
CENTRAL VIDEO AGGREGATION PLATFORMS
45
VIDEO PUBLICITY PLATFORMS
46
VIDEO ARCHIVING PLATFORMS
48
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2009 Whole of Government Video Service
SUMMARY
48
9. TECHNOLOGY
51
INTRODUCTION
51
BASICS
51
VIDEO SOLUTIONS
66
10. RECOMMENDATION
76
INTRODUCTION
76
ARCHITECTURE RECOMMENDATION
76
ESTIMATED INVESTMENT REQUIRED
79
11. CONCLUDING REMARKS
82
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1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Our scoping of a whole-of-government video solution has been underpinned by semi-formal
discussions with a number of agencies including the “National Archives of Australia”, “Department of
Innovation, Industry, Science and Research”, “Australian Taxation Office”, and” Department of
Human Services”. These discussions have been the key inspiration for our initial thoughts which, in
turn, have driven technical requirements, cost modelling, and recommendations.
AGENCIES
While our discussions with agencies, mainly with web teams, cannot be considered comprehensive,
what we have been told might be representative of the broader Australian Public Service (APS). The
agencies have told us the following:





A growing desire for online video coming from line and program areas, communications
sections, and senior management.
Any lack of online video content is partly based on it being “too hard” with bandwidth costs
being the area of most concern.
I.T. sections are perceived as primary resisters.
Their CMS has not yet been extended with video functionality.
Production of more video is seen as the primary restraint and guidance on this would be
welcome.
The agencies seemed very open to a central video service that allows them to publish video to a
central repository/servers and embed video within their websites and intranets, with internal and
stakeholder communications seen as just as important as citizen focus.
They see consultation across the APS as the most important need if a centralised video solution is
developed. They would like to play a part in shaping the functionality and would most definitely
need to be involved in any cost sharing models.
BEST PRACTICE
We are taking a very literal position on best practice. As such, we contend that there is no best
practice in online video across government, worldwide. There does not seem to be any nation that
has a central government video portal. However, we will be identifying some ‘better’ practice in our
report.
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2009 Whole of Government Video Service
Our discussions with key U.S. government staff has revealed that the size and culture of their public
service is seen as an insurmountable obstacle against any centralised service. To paraphrase, they
have simply not considered it deeply.
We will be putting forward the opinion that Australia is uniquely placed to develop such an
infrastructure through our smaller and more localized APS.
RECOMMENDATIONS
We are recommending a multi-part approach starting with a substantial improvement in use of
YouTube through a central gov.au channel that links to all agency channels, similar to the US
government channel on YouTube. This will encourage agencies to produce short videos and will
build a publicity channel.
We are recommending that this is supported by creation of a series of videos to boost the content
on the YouTube channels, and a PR campaign to promote this to the Australian people. These
activities will provide insight into expected load of any dedicated video portal.
We are recommending that australia.gov.au be extended to provide cross-government video search
and browsing capabilities in a consistent and government-branded manner.
We are recommending creation of a white label government video solution that will provide
YouTube style functionality to agencies from a system run within government and therefore capable
of satisfying all requirements on agency branding, video duration, accessibility, tiered access,
metadata, archiving, and extensibility.
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2. FRAMING
ONLINE VIDEO – SETTING THE SCENE
Online video, like many overnight sensations, has a fascinating and long history. Unlike other
elements in the online space, digital video was already well advanced on the innovation curve before
the Web arrived. It is important to understand this when looking at any major online video project.
The longevity of the innovation path might bring profound advances across the next five to ten
years, driven by the exploding web channel and increasing bandwidth but supported by a relatively
mature technology base.
Early research and development in digital video culminated in the release in 1986 of the Sony D-1
format, which was used primarily by television networks and was an uncompressed format.
Compressed digital video was first seen in Sony's Digital Betacam technology which is still widely
used. The first computer based digital video for personal computers was PICS Animation Compiler
(PACO) which was released in early 1991. Not long after, in mid 1991, Apple released its QuickTime
format.
The release of MacroMind VideoWorks in 1985 and Apple’s HyperCard software in 1987 heralded
the start of interactive multimedia development. The first federal government interactive
multimedia CD ROM (Introducing Multimedia) was developed in HyperCard. The MacroMind
product became MacroMedia Director in 1993 and it quickly overtook HyperCard as the standard
development tool. Its superior use of video was one of the major reasons for this. It is now Adobe
Director but, for our purposes, its main claim to fame is its offspring, Flash, released in late 1996.
Flash is now the dominant platform for online video and has powered the explosion in use of online
video with Real Video, Apple’s QuickTime, and Microsoft’s Windows Media formats sharing
supporting roles.
While we saw early online video portals springing up in 2003-2004 that leveraged the increased
maturity and ubiquity of the Flash format, the launch of YouTube in 2005 was the tipping point.
The best estimate is that the number of online videos is growing at about 40 to 60% per annum1.
We can predict with confidence that the amount of video on the Web is going to continue to
increase massively even if the rapid expansion rate of the last few years does taper off.
1
http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/05/zoinks-20-hours-of-video-uploaded-every_20.html
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2009 Whole of Government Video Service
It is also estimated that the time the average web surfer spends watching online video is also
increasing at similar rates2. The comScore Video Metrix, suggests that more than 168 million U.S.
Internet users watched nearly 26 billion online videos during September 20093. We can assume,
based on historical trends, that Australia would have a per capita similarity. So Australians may have
watched more than 2 billion online videos in the past year.
Right now, more than 23 hours of video are uploaded onto YouTube every minute4. For some
perspective, that means that there is 1,380 hours uploaded per hour, 33,120 per day, 231,840 per
week, 993,600 per month, and 11,923,200 hours per year, almost 12M hours of new video content
per year! We can easily imagine growth in the future will explode through consumer mobile video
uploading and the major content owners releasing more long-form video.
As is the case with other major streams of online innovation, mobile consumption (and
creation/uploading) of online video is rising rapidly. The predicted surge in mobile broadband speeds
will only increase this trend. Of course, the emergence of ITV (Internet TV) is quite possibly the main
game. Hence, most advanced thinking in online video is based on the “three screen” model.
In formulating any approach to a government video initiative that may influence efforts across the
next five years, we need to be mindful of the three screens: the computer, the mobile device, and
the television.
BROAD ISSUES
CONTENT CONSCIOUSNESS
The Web has forced almost every organisation to diversify what it does and how it does it. A
significant impact has been that all organisations are now content publishers. While there has
always been an element of this, in that marketing, PR, and communications have been centrally
important functions, the Web has placed the publishing effort at the core and across organisations.
Right now, many organisations including public service agencies have online teams that match, in
numbers, many rural print newspapers. The volume of original content these organisations place
online is also equal to, or more than, a rural newspaper.
2
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/total-online-video-streams-up-41-from-last-year/
3
http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2009/9/Google_Sites_Surpasses_10_Billion_Video_Views_in_August
4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4BRY56u2xw#t=5m20s
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Whole of Government Video Service 2009
As the Web continues to become the key public face for organisations, there is a new focus on
quality of content and this is bringing a new challenge – attracting staff with content creation
experience.
Simple recordings of presentations or even simple vodcasts can now be mastered by anyone with a
little practice – the recording technology has matured enough to provide high quality consumer
cameras that are sufficient for simple video productions. Also, the number of low-price and
acceptable quality video editing programs has increased making it easier to produce content inhouse.
However, creation of high quality content, that may well include digital post-processing and aftereffects, continues to require special skills, typically requiring professional video production. Such
skills are hard to find and retain in Web teams. This will likely remain a major issue as organisations
look to produce more video. Most organisations have high standards and any video produced will
naturally need to be up to these standards.
The YouTube generation, who use video as part of their online engagement, will be the first
generation to have acquired sufficient semi-professional video production skills to naturally publish
video and audio with similar ease as text content.
APS SPECIFIC ISSUES
Here, we have collected a number of special issues that stood out from our discussions with
agencies in the APS.
ACCESSIBILITY
While it applies to any online video, the issue of accessibility is central to any government video. At
this stage, there have only been a few government videos available online that comply with the level
that we should be seeking, moving forward. The additional resources required to ensure accessibility
in videos, while not overwhelming, will be a central issue. Technologies are now available that allow
automated time alignment of transcripts and produce captions and subtitles, e.g. on YouTube. This
goes a long way towards simplifying the creation of accessible content. In addition, the use of timed
text as audio descriptions read through a screen-reader will further enable new levels of
accessibility.
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2009 Whole of Government Video Service
RECORD KEEPING
Government agencies have significant and challenging requirements for record keeping. This effort,
led by the National Archives, will have significant impact on the use of online video. The importance
of this will need to be highlighted across the next decade as agencies use more video online.
DIGITISATION
Again, while this is an issue across all online video, the APS may have videos prior to digital platforms
(DVD) that agencies would want to place online. Of course, major holders such as NFSA and NAA are
at the coal-face of this and are both working on mass digitisation and cataloguing projects. This issue
will be less important as the major digitisation processes advance and as new material is born digital.
CURRENCY
While all organisations need to be mindful of the currency and validity of their online content, the
APS needs to be especially rigorous.
This need is often most pronounced when government changes or in portfolio changes. In general,
video content will be more visible to a site visitor than other content and so it is going to be
important that the APS works through the issues of currency and validity of online video carefully.
The enhanced communications power of video, as compared to text based communications, is also
the factor that could make a video more damaging and embarrassing if left online beyond its
validity.
STATE OF TECHNOLOGY
The technology that underpins web innovation is simultaneously maturing and constantly changing.
The latter is an important aspect that requires further consideration.
While the constantly changing paradigm is dominant and certainly suits the vendors of Web
technology and services, there is also an argument that there are many aspects that are not
changing so quickly.
The Web (and its mobile and TV offspring) is standards-based. This is the actual foundation of all
Web efforts. The politic of the standards is well known to rival the most heated political arena.
Debate goes on across a large standards community every day. From this process, new standards
and adjustments to standards are made.
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Of course, the most important standards work, in direct relationship to Web development, is now in
the HTML 5.0 space. A key aspect of developing standards is the back-compatibility and the arcane
discussions are still grounded in HTML 1.0 and every version since.
So, in many ways, the technology innovation is partly about brands and tools based on the same
fundamentals.
Web development has also paradoxically become more complex and easier. Underpinning this is the
use of open-source frameworks to develop the computer code for online software. These
frameworks allow developers to use components developed and improved by many developers and
quickly ‘glue’ these together to make new and sophisticated Web experiences. Typical frameworks
are built on the Web application programming languages PHP, Java, Python, Ruby, or Perl. Example
frameworks are Ruby on Rails, CakePHP, CodeIgnitor, Catalyst, Django, or Google Web Toolkit.
These frameworks have also given rise to sophisticated and stable whole solutions that are then
made available to individuals and corporate markets. The most visible of these are generally in the
content management space (Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, Plone, etc) but they are numerous across
all types of Web functionality and service.
The almost obligatory APIs provided by these solutions, which can be used by anyone to develop
unique interactions with an online system, has seen a massive explosion in third-party modules.
This world can be referred to as Rapid Application Development (RAD).
RAD is at the heart of all web innovation. Twitter was developed as a full working prototype in three
days inclusive of the beginnings of the real technical challenge, scaling the solution to cope with
massive use. RAD is also behind the explosion in advanced websites that would be revealed by a
search on “latest Web 2.0 apps”.
Web applications that are far more sophisticated than any found in the APS web space are being
developed everyday by RAD developers, many as a hobby.
The use of RAD has had a less speedy entry into the corporate and government markets. It may be
that major vendors are keen to keep expectations of development times and costs at a premium.
The more web focused corporations (banks, media, pure-click) have taken up RAD much more
readily.
Indeed, many pure-click players (Amazon, Google, Yahoo, etc) have developed cloud based RAD
environments for developers to use to create highly sophisticated web environments through almost
point-and-click interfaces.
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CONCLUSION
The Web is both a mature communications and service delivery platform and a dynamic
environment. On balance, it is more the former than the latter. Advances will, through an adherence
to standards, be easier to adapt to than what might be thought.
Hence, there is less danger in charting major directions across any web effort now than previously
might have been the case. The broader and APS specific issues, as they relate to online video, are
relatively minor compared to the opportunities. Impediments are mainly cultural and attention to
them within existing staff and recruitment will see the issues fade over time.
More specific issues such as accessibility and record keeping will benefit from the expertise of
relevant agencies who will easily adapt their core knowledge into the video space. Importantly, this
must happen.
We believe that the graphic below, referenced from Wikipedia, is an important snapshot for anyone
seeking to understand where the Web is at this moment. The graphic names and gives some ranking
to the key paradigms and RAD technologies that bring the advanced we to life.
We believe that organisations, including APS agencies, could do worse than to convert this graphic
to a checklist and then measure their online efforts against the paradigms and technologies.
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3. BEST PRACTICE
INTRODUCTION
At the outset, we can confidently say that no nation has yet attempted the creation of a whole-ofgovernment video portal. Hence, using a very strict definition of ‘best practice’ we believe that none
exists as it specifically relates to our brief. However, there are many better practice models that we
will explore.
WHY HASN’T IT BEEN D ONE BEFORE
In discussions with key U.S. Government web players, we have been able to identify why they have
not seriously considered a whole-of-government approach. Simply, the size of their public service is
such that the effort would seem almost impossible.
They do not have an obvious lead agency that would have the authority and mechanisms to bring
agencies on-board. Overall, US Government agencies tend to be larger than their Australian
counterparts and have a larger independence from other Government agencies.
These factors have brought them to a position where they do not see the need being yet worthy of
the significant effort. To some degree, they do not see the actual need. This may be partly due to the
heavier influence on state and local government on the lives of U.S. citizens than what is
experienced in Australia.
Most US agencies are using online video independently. Almost all have some kind of video
functionality incorporated into their existing Web presence – many through a dedicated video or
multimedia page with dedicated video or multimedia search.
INDIVIDUAL AGENCY BEST PRACTICE
To gain some insights into what a Government-wide best practice for Australia could look like, we
analysed the video publications of other governments and their agencies. Here we list the best
examples that we found.
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2009 Whole of Government Video Service
THE WHITE HOUSE
The Obama Administration has placed
significant focus on the use of online video
and the White House website would be the
current international leader. It has a tab for
browsing video content and video search. It
would be fair to class it is a video driven site.
U.S. GOVERNMENT YOUTUBE CHANNEL
The US Government YouTube channel is
clearly the leading example of use of
YouTube by a national government through
the volume and frequency of videos posted
and linked to by other agency channels.
S.A. GOVERNMENT YOUTUBE CHANNEL
With a similar motivation to the US
Government, the S.A. Government GCIO has
rolled out a YouTube companion site for its
Government website at sa.gov.au. They plan
to publish sessions of parliament, events,
television advertisement, and speeches on
the site.
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Whole of Government Video Service 2009
AUSTRALIAN DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH
AND AGEING
The yourHealth video wall is one of the most
advanced uses of online video
internationally through its use of usergenerated content (UGC) and innovative
interface.
UGC highly improves engagement with
citizens and should thus be a feature of a
government video solution.
FLU.GOV
This YouTube site is notable for the use of
longer-form videos and the fully
government branded interface despite the
use of YouTube for publishing.
AIDS.GOV
This internal site features proprietary audio
and video players and is hosted by the
National Institute of Health.
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2009 Whole of Government Video Service
NASA VIDEO GALLERY
NASA has been at the forefront of the online
revolution. Their video channel is not only
one of the oldest, it is one of the most
engaging. Hence, it is easily the most
popular government video destination in
the world.
NASA MULTIMEDIA SEARCH
NASA also provides a dedicated site to
search and browse across their collections
of images, video and audio.
This is a great example of what a
government-wide multimedia site could
look like.
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE NEWS
The U.S. Department of Defense runs its
own online News channel. Very
professional, TV news style content is
published several times daily.
All videos can be browsed and searched and
are hosted on government servers.
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METAVID – THE OPEN VIDEO ARCHIVE
OF U.S. CONGRESS
The world leader in the broadcasting of
parliamentary proceedings.
It gains this accolade partly through its
advanced use of transcript and video
synchronization, structured tagging, and the
use of the new HTML5 standard video
element.
COMMERCIAL BEST PRACTICE
In order to further our understanding of better practice in online video, we have looked across the
commercial space for more comprehensive innovation. We offer the following as a small sample of
the sort of video landscape that exists on the Web and from which government can learn.
NEW SCIENTIST VIDEO
While not the most comprehensive collection
of videos, the videos are produced exclusively
for the channel, sharable, embeddable,
presented in a modern way, and refer to each
other - all hallmarks of a modern online video
presence.
Hence, it has much to teach about how online
video should be produced.
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2009 Whole of Government Video Service
HOMEDEPOT TV
The hardware category killer in the USA has
been at the forefront of web technology for
more than a decade.
Its highly popular online TV channel is
distinguished by the volume of the videos, the
way they are produced to work in the online
environment, and extensive use of semantics to
provide viewers with related content.
HOME DEPOT YOUTUBE
The retailers YouTube channel provides us with
a great example of the inter-relationship
between a stand-alone video portal and a
YouTube Channel.
While the HomeDepot TV site was already
popular, the YouTube channel has increased
visitors and now is one of the main providers of
visitors to the main video site.
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
While the video on the site is exceptional in
quality and content, the site also is a good
benchmark in the use of related content to
deepen the viewer’s online experience.
This additional content includes e-learning
modules that support the educational focus of
National Geographic.
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EXPERIMENTAL BEST PRACTICE
Online media technology is undergoing a radical evolution with the introduction of HTML5’s video
and audio elements. Instead of requiring installation of a Browser plugin to allow decoding of
QuickTime, Windows Media, Adobe Flash, or other media formats, HTML5 will support video and
audio natively – just like images. The codecs under discussion are H.264/AAC and Ogg
Theora/Vorbis.
The current standardisation efforts for audio and video evolve around accessibility. There is
agreement to natively support captions for the hard-of-hearing, subtitles for internationalisation and
also textual audio descriptions which can be read out through the screenreader for vision-impaired
users. When this standardisation effort completes, HTML5 video will have the best accessibility
support for any online media technology.
HTML5 VIDEO WITH CAPTIONS
This HTML5 Ogg video has built-in captions
displayed by the browser and textual
audio descriptions for screenreaders to
provide accessibility to vision impaired
people.
Note how the video player is styled
through normal Web page styling
functionality rather than a special
application.
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4. APS ONLINE VIDEO LANDSCAPE
INTRODUCTION
To prepare this report, our team has had conversations with a small sample of agencies, mainly with
their web and communications services areas. These have been semi-formal discussions aimed at
gaining some insights into general attitudes, plans, etc.
Discussions were held with National Archives, Department of Human Services, DIISR, S.A.
Government GCIO, and NSW Government GCIO.
Input was also received via the Gov 2.0 blog from individuals within other agencies.
We have also held discussions with a leading video production house that services the APS to gain
insights into volumes of production and attitudes to online publishing.
We have also analysed the amount of video production taking place within the APS and compared
this to a sample of agencies current online video.
APS VIDEO PRODUCTION
In scoping any online video functionality across the APS, it is important to understand the state of
play for video production by the APS. To do this, we undertook an audit of information contained
from the contracts.gov.au website across October 08 – October 09.
To this end, we estimate that the APS commissions at least $10M in corporate video production per
annum which results in about 200 videos. This may not include many videos produced under larger
public information campaigns which are not itemized on the contracts site and we are aware of
some videos being produced under the reporting threshold. On any measure, we can say with
confidence that there is quite a substantial amount of video production undertaken across the APS
and that these are across a wide range of subjects. A quick look at the two years prior suggests that
there is about the same amount of videos produced every year.
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The breakdown of agencies that commission video production is as follows:
It is difficult to completely map the video produced last year against the video now online. This is
caused by the lack of title information within contracts.gov.au to enable cross-referencing. However,
we can look broadly across what can be seen on the public web to make some initial observations.
To provide structure, we have specifically looked at key departments and agencies identified above
and make some broad conclusions.
DEFENCE
The Department, as seen, is the major procurer of video services in the APS. They have
commissioned approximately 60 videos across the last year. As would be expected, they are also the
clear leaders in online video.
Their main website features a “video” section which contains a mix of full videos and what we could
call video snippets. These videos seem to be also routinely placed on YouTube. So, for expediency,
we will look at their YouTube Channels which seem to directly match their on-site video.
The ADF Media Channel was created in September 2007 and has 96 videos. The channel has had
27,000 views; the sum of the video views is 217,501 views. In August 2008, the “ADF Channel” was
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2009 Whole of Government Video Service
launched and it has 5 videos. It appears that the ADF Media channel is largely snippet videos and the
ADF Channel is used for professionally produced full videos.
Department of Defence website
Defence Forces Media Channel on YouTube
As well as these ‘central’ channels, there is the Air Force channel (105 videos) and Recruitment (17
videos).
It is important to clarify that many videos across these channels are longer videos that have been
uploaded in sections, since YouTube has a 10min limit on the duration of videos. Hence, the actual
number of videos is less than the raw number.
Our assessment is that Defence is a leader in the use of online video in the APS.
HEALTH AND AGEING
The main DHA website does not seem to have any clearly identified video channel. Searching for
“video” does reveal a lot of press releases talking about video but these do not seem to contain any
directions on where to find the video.
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Department of Health and Ageing website
We did locate videos of television commercials on a number of micro-sites for major health
campaigns but these, as suggested, are not included in our audit of procured video.
We are not able to locate a YouTube channel and we have not been able to locate individual videos
on YouTube.
Interestingly, what DHA video that is on YouTube seems to be posted by interest groups such as the
anti-smoking lobby.
We conclude that DHA is an active producer of video but seems to use it in a limited fashion online.
Having said that, the Department is responsible for one of the most innovative uses of online video as included in our benchmarks reported in an earlier section. It is obviously starting its way into the
modern style websites and we expect a more Web2.0 style website with more engaging content will
be on their roadmap.
AUSTRALIAN TAXATION OFFICE
While the ATO is clearly producing a number of videos, we are only able to find three Webcasts on
their main website and these were on average 10 min long, of high production quality, and played in
overlays, which is no longer the preferred way of presenting video online.
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Australian Taxation Office website
We were unable to find any of their videos on YouTube, but found several Tax related videos by
Australian citizens or Tax attorneys that attempt at helping Australians understand their Tax
obligations.
The ATO clearly has many opportunities to extend their Web presence with videos of interest to the
public and make the Website less text-centric and more interactive.
AUSAID
AUSAID produces very high quality videos that support the good work they do on our behalf. They
launched their YouTube channel in July 09 and they have uploaded 29 videos some of which are
being used on their main website. The video channel has 5,245 views, the sum of the video views is
7,174.
Australia’s Aid Program website
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Australia’s Aid Program YouTube Channel
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We conclude that they are using YouTube very well but haven’t integrated it with their main site
very well, since video content cannot be located or searched for easily.
QUESTACON
As one of our most innovative institutions with a special brief to engage young people, Questacon
has been a significant producer of video. Most of the video on their site is used as part of interactive
presentations.
They also have had a YouTube channel since March 07 and it now has 83 videos, 2,082 channel
views and 42,806 combined video views.
Questacon website
Questacon YouTube Channel
We believe that Questacon is a leader in the use of interactive online video and are using their
YouTube channel effectively. Exposure of video on the Website through media search could be an
opportunity.
OTHER AGENCIES
There are other agencies that are using YouTube including:

DBCDE (19 videos, 5,228 channel views, 2,447 video views),

Environment (24 videos, 27,661 channel views, 49,559 video views),

Child Support Agency (10 videos, 594 channel views, 2,916 video views), and

National Archives (5 videos, 458 channel views, 5,189 video views).
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CONCLUSIONS
It is clear that Departments and agencies are taking initial steps into online video. These are mainly
using YouTube to publish the videos. There is limited use of video on the agency websites and with
the exception of defence; these are not aggregated into a specific section or searchable.
Where videos are posted on agency websites, they are rightly placed within context by appearing
within a specific program.
ISSUES
In our discussion with the agencies, we have been able to identify some common threads that may
be impeding the use of online video for citizen, internal, and stakeholder engagement.
The broad consensus was that video was “too hard” to get online. In this, many saw video as being a
unique type of file that required more technical knowledge than other files. This seemed to be
compounded by a cost consideration. Agencies may be holding back on the basis that if more videos
were placed on their websites, the viewing of these would result in very high costs in bandwidth use.
This also seems to be part of the rationale that agency I.T. areas cite as the reason for either
discouraging use on online video or, in some cases, refusing to allow. We heard that some I.T. areas
would discourage video because they did not have the expertise to support these files.
In one case, we were told that there was some fear that video files could be a security risk. We are
not certain why this would be.
While the above issues were important, some agencies professed to simply having not given much
thought to the use of online video and that there was no agency policy in place to frame how and
when video could be used.
While the server and streaming issues outlined were an impediment, we believe that the production
of video remains a key challenge. Notwithstanding the amount of video produced, as described,
agencies are grappling with the need to provide different levels of video for online use in
comparison to e.g. classic TV commercial use.
The videos that are commissioned are, judging by their budgets, sophisticated and professionally
produced. Agencies believe that they need to do more work on what could be called semiprofessional video production that would allow quick delivery of such things as speeches, senior
management addresses, etc.
There was also some suggestion that AGIMO did not support the use of video for accessibility
reasons and this has impeded some agencies. Collaboration with Media Access Australia and Vision
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Australia to define achievable levels of accessibility requirements in a projected government video
solution is recommended.
GROWING DESIRE
Everyone we discussed the issues with spoke of an increasing pressure to use more video. These
pressures are coming from within communications/PR sections and also increasingly from within
line/program areas.
Importantly, many spoke of their senior management wishing to use video more extensively. While
there was suggestions that these are driven by a need to be seen to do this, most seemed to be
genuine requests based on the validity of video as a communications driver.
The Department of Human Services is the best example of this. While the department was not able
to share details, they explained that there were major reforms in motion across the portfolio. These
changes will bring a new culture to the way that DHS service delivery agencies work and the use of
video has already been identified as a way to inform and train the staff.
When discussion was guided by us on what sort of video might be produced for online delivery, the
agencies were very interested. We posed a base question about what ‘how to’ videos could be
produced. Each agency was able to see a wide range of suitable subjects.
When we posed the question of these agencies taking part in a supported trial involving the sort of
videos they offered as candidates, the interest was extremely high.
As foreshadowed, it was in the area of ‘semi-pro’ video that the agencies were most interested in.
They see a growing need for agencies to be able to produce quick ‘talking head’ videos of senior
management for internal and stakeholder dissemination.
The agencies also discussed the need for more video conferencing and those conferences being
recorded and made available, again to internal staff and stakeholders.
To a lesser degree, agencies also identified online learning as an ongoing area of interest and they
see a large role for video in these endeavours.
CONCLUSIONS
One of the more interesting outcomes of our discussions with web teams was their surprise when
shown their agencies history of video production. Simply, they seemed to have no idea that so much
video was produced.
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We believe that this reveals a wider issue. There may still be a lack of understanding between the
various areas within agencies that are concerned with communications and the Web areas.
There also seems to be a somewhat tense relationship between web teams and the I.T. areas within
departments.
On one occasion it was suggested that the Web team had simply “given up” and have become
pragmatic in their relationships with their stakeholder clients in the agency and the I.T. department.
The Web team knew they could do much better (and that video would play a role) but they have
come to face the reality.
They spoke of an ongoing battle with communications driven areas who were seeking ways to “get
around” the seemingly impenetrable barriers. For people who have a natural instinct for innovation,
the Web teams found it dispiriting to play the role of gatekeeper.
Hence, we have concluded that there are cultural issues that would need to be addressed in an
ongoing manner.
We believe that video offers a unique opportunity as its very nature will tend to draw the balance of
‘power’ away from the I.T. areas and toward the communicators and citizen / stakeholder
engagement teams. We contend that web teams would find this new order more conducive to their
aims and innovation instincts.
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5. PROPOSED VIDEOS
INSTRUCTIONAL VIDEOS
As we have shown, there is already a large amount of video produced across the APS and much is
not yet online. While many videos may not be suitable or relevant, there is no doubt that a
concerted effort to upload those that are suitable and relevant will enhance the communications
and engagement between the government and the public.
Enhancing this even further would be the production of videos specifically for the online channel. In
our discussions with agencies we gauged their reactions to the idea that the agency being funded (or
partly supported) to produce these videos. The agencies were not only supportive but also engaged
in what these videos could be.
Within short brainstorming, the agencies were able to identify a wide range of topics that would be
well suited to short but complete video explanations. These included internal, stakeholder, and
public facing subjects.
There seemed to be some agreement that these could be grouped together across the APS as the
“how to” series. They could cover everything from how to use the archives to research family history
through to how to apply for a Medicare card, as just two examples.
OTHER VIDEOS
The agencies also highlighted a range of video productions that they would like to produce. These
included the video depiction of presentations (such as PowerPoints), addresses from senior
management and staff, video press releases, events recordings, and news bulletins.
These might be produced in a semi-professional or ‘industrial’ level manner and agencies see that
internal skills would be something to consider.
CURRENT VIDEO OPPORTUNITIES
In our discussions we also identified two major initiatives that might benefit from a more significant
online video treatment.
DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN SERVICES REFORM
The department has announced major changes that will transform the way that the service delivery
agencies will work. The integration of agencies including Centrelink, Medicare, the Child Support
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Agency, Australian Hearing and CRS Australia into single-point delivery will first need to be
communicated across the Human Services portfolio.
DHS has already determined that video has a major role in meeting these challenges prior to contact
with us.
The department revealed that a video training and communications package that is based on
scenarios may be part of the rollout.
This may be a perfect opportunity to develop a beta intranet/extranet based video service that may
then be used by other agencies.
DIISR - BUSINESS NAMES REGISTRATION PROJECT
The BNRP is in architecture phase for the development of and a seamless national business
registration system that traverses all APS agencies and relevant state and local government
requirements. Its vision is a one-stop online service that small business can use to complete all
formal start-up processes.
It is felt that the project is near to the having a quality map of the processes involved.
There may be an opportunity to leverage that knowledge within an innovative online video presence
that takes advantage of scenario drive processes (a baker in Toowoomba, etc) to create a highly
interactive, across government video tutorial.
We believe that such a project would be a world-first and can see how the actual online solution
developed for the BNRP could be integrated into the video-driven interface.
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6. FIRST RECOMMENDATIONS
From our discussions with the agencies, we are certain that there is a growing desire to publish more
video online. Two main challenges hold people back: the lack of knowledge about video production
(what videos to produce and how to produce them) and the technical challenges.
After consideration of all of the above, we recommend that more support is provided to the
agencies from a central government video initiative.
To help agencies move into the video age, training activities can be provided that also help identify
what video opportunities there are in an agency and how to approach them to create content.
Further a list of recommended vendors in the space could be provided to identify good producers
where a more professional approach is necessary. For the every-day agency content, a list of good
production equipment could be provided together with a typical workflow on what to do when and
how to make sure that accessibility requirements are met.
Integration of video into the CMS of an agency and into australia.gov.au is another challenge that
needs to be overcome. The technical opportunities and scope for these will be addressed in the next
sections.
Finally, there is an opportunity to unify the YouTube presence of government agencies and the
provisioning of a whole-of-government channel with links back to the individual agencies.
In the next sections we look in detail at requirements and technical possibilities of providing a
government-wide video solution.
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7. REQUIREMENTS ON TECHNOLOGY
INTRODUCTION
The requirements for a technical solution in this section have been collected from multiple sources:
online discussions at the Government 2.0 Task force website, discussions with the project sponsor
Peter Alexander, discussions with some of the experts named by the Task force, discussions with
agencies, and last but not least our analysis of best practice.
While it is almost impossible to create a requirements list that satisfies everyone's needs, the key
here is to identify the technical needs such that in the next step we are able to propose different
architectural solutions that can satisfy the requirements.
OVERVIEW: GENERAL FUNCTIONALITY
We have grouped the requirements into larger topics– this makes it easier to list them and compare
system solutions to the requirements.

Production: Agencies that want to publish video often have to overcome the problems of
how to produce video in the first place, typically never having had the practice, nor knowing
the possibilities with respect to what content to produce, scripting, shooting, and editing.

Publishing: The complexities of publishing and delivering video and audio online are another
stumbling block for agencies. This is mostly a technical challenge that can be solved by
offering a service that will make it easier and adheres to government video publishing
compliance requirements, which include amongst other things accessibility and metadata
requirements.

Searchability: From a user’s point of view, video that is published must be easily accessible,
findable, and consumable. Finding video and audio on agency sites is a bit of a hit and miss –
most are just part of the general flow of articles, have no separate metadata, and are not
individually searchable – means for improving this situation need to be part of a government
video activity.

Archiving: As video is being produced and published directly in the digital domain, video
must be made a part of the archiving and record keeping processes other digital content has
to adhere to. It is important to provide a means to archive the high quality video and audio
source material and store it with appropriate metadata. A government video solution should
provide for such needs automatically without agencies having to worry about it.
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
Engagement and publicity: Video that is produced and tells a government message should
get as much public exposure as possible. A huge opportunity with current social engagement
networks is by hooking government video into the existing networks that citizens use
amongst themselves. Not only can the videos transport the message themselves, but also
can they draw eyes back to other related government Web content.
PRODUCTION-RELATED REQUIREMENTS
These requirements mainly focus on challenges that agencies have to deal with when trying to move
into the age of video.
While these are in principle outside a technical solution for publishing, agencies still often have to
grapple with the issue of how to produce video content in the first place that is appropriate to their
needs and will prepare appropriate source material for publishing. They ask questions such as:

What types of content can/should be published?

How to script an audio/video production?

How to shoot audio/video footage? What equipment should be bought / rented?

How to edit audio/video footage? What editors are appropriate?

What format to encode it into for archiving and to prepare for publishing?

What companies could be used to help with video production? What is reasonable pricing?
The best means of helping agencies solve these issues is through:

Guidelines e.g. of what content to produce / what not to produce, what format to encode into

Training

List of suggestions / recommendations, e.g. of content fit for publishing, equipment to purchase,
recommended video production partners, recommended video editors
The report looks at the format question later. Here, it may suffice to say that the original digital
format should be in as high quality as possible, since it will be archived and the source material for
any future transcoding needs. Typically, DVD quality would be the minimum quality to use for
archiving.
The format to use for uploading and publishing should be reasonable – high quality but compressed
such that the upload process doesn’t take too long. Typically, H.264 in QuickTime mov or flv format
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are good formats to use. Ogg Theora is not yet used as an export format from video editing
software, but is expected to emerge as another good production format in future.
PUBLISHING-RELATED REQUIREMENTS
The following are functionality requirements that a publishing and distribution platform should fulfil
to make life easy for the publisher:

Standard publishing format for video material

Upload / Inject functionality

Mass upload functionality

Transcoding functionality for a vast range of upload formats

Publishing to different Web and mobile formats

Automated thumbnail creation

Support for audio-only as well as video files

Pre-defined appropriate metadata, keywords, categories possibly partially filled in for
agency

Engagement functionality: comments, ratings, favouriting, sharing, embedding

Support user-uploaded content

Pre-defined set of licenses and rules to chose from

Video player for single, and groups (playlists) of videos

Embedding of video player into third-party sites

Ability to block embedding

Adaptable branding on the video player

Cascading fallback solutions for video player for almost every possible Web browser setup
with a ultimate fallback to a download option

High/low bandwidth versions of video and support for mobile
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
Support for overlay captions and subtitles at minimum, but also transcripts and timing of
transcripts with screen readers to create audio descriptions

Sign language tracks, audio description tracks, and dubbed audio tracks could be used and
need displaying

Search and browsing functionality

Availability of video statistics: total number of plays, unique plays, bandwidth used, number
of embeds, hotspots, statistics on caption use and other variants

Reasonable deployment cost
For government use, the publishing platform could provide extra features such as:

Automated generation and insertion of default intro / outro titles including specific
metadata fields, such as agency, license, attribution, presence of vision / audio of indigenous
Australians

Intranet / Internet servicing of content

Integration with existing authentication and authorisation systems
As we will see later, many platforms are available to provide such a system, though none will provide
for all the functionality. When choosing a system one has to make sure that the list be segmented
into absolutely required functionalities, nice-to-have functionalities, and less important
functionalities. Then, any system under consideration can be evaluated with respect to meeting
these requirements appropriately.
SEARCHABILITY-RELATED REQUIREMENTS
These requirements mainly focus on the needs of target users. If a video cannot be found easily by a
user of the website, or more generally by an Internet user, all the effort that has gone into producing
it was in vain. Therefore it is important to make the content discoverable.

Videos should have their own host page, so they can stand on their own with their own full
text information.

SEO should be applied to video content, too.

Metadata, subtitles and transcripts should be exposed to external search engines for
indexing.
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
Embedded videos should retain their metadata so they can be indexed by the site-wide
search engine and also by Internet search engines.

Site-wide search engines should index video as much as any other Web content.

A video tab should provide an overview of all videos published on a site.

A mediaRSS feed of all videos per agency and per topic should be available so people can
subscribe to them and find out about new postings, and syndicate them to other sites.

Further discoverability can be achieved through providing tags on videos that are integrated
into the search terms and can even be displayed in a tag cloud to be clicked through from.
These are requirements for a central video of government site, but also for every single agency
website that wants to take video seriously.
ARCHIVING-RELATED REQUIREMENTS
The requirements in this subsection focus on the needs of a digital archive that has to store the
media files and their metadata and make it available and searchable. Naturally, the needs depend on
what archiving infrastructure may already exist for digital objects and whether the video archiving
should become part of an existing solution or whether a new solution needs to be built or whether
the video solution for government agencies should in itself be a video archive as well as a publishing
platform.

What format will the digital media objects be stored in? On Disk or on tape?

Source material is always the highest quality - which original file formats are accepted as
storage formats?

What metadata should be stored for the digital media objects?

Will there be controlled vocabularies and ontologies to choose from?

What access rights will be defined for the digital media objects?

What re-publishing rights are there on the digital media objects?

Will video archiving be integrated with other archiving solutions?

What will the workflow be?

How will it be possible to extract a video and its metadata from the archive?
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
Will it be possible to provide an automated conversion to multiple video output formats
from any one of a number of video input formats?

What open API will the video archive provide? For upload, search, syndication?
These are all questions that an archiving solution will need to be able to answer. Notice that there is
a lot of overlap with the requirements for a publishing platform with the exception that publishing
platforms tend not use controlled vocabularies and ontologies to save and record the metadata
around objects, but rather use the more flexible keywords, categories and descriptive text. Also, the
storage of the original, typically large source content material and the availability of transcoding into
all sorts of output formats are not widespread on publishing platforms.
PUBLICITY-RELATED REQUIREMENTS
Video is a great means to make a message heard. However, if video is not publicised widely, only
regular readers and occasional searches will lead people toward the content. It is important that the
videos becomes part of the conversations people typically have online, which means video should be
part of the social networks that people regularly use.

Every video publication should be announced to twitter and similar short messaging systems (in
particular identi.ca).

Video that can stand alone with its message should be re-published on the largest video publicity
site of the Web: YouTube. The Google search engine favours YouTube videos in its search
results5, which will expose the videos to a larger audience. Bing allows for video playback
previews from multiple video providers directly in their search results. Also, YouTube is now the
second largest search engine directly behind Google6, so anything that is published on YouTube
has a high publicity value. Video is increasingly taking a more important position in Web search
engines – a situation to take advantage of.

Every department should have their own YouTube channel. There should be a central
government channel that links to all the department channels (example of best practice:
http://www.youtube.com/usgovernment )
5
http://blogs.forrester.com/marketing/2009/01/the-easiest-way.html
6
http://www.tgdaily.com/trendwatch-features/39777-youtube-surpasses-yahoo-as-worlds-2-search-engine
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
Videos should be part of a more general social networking strategy – if a department decides to,
e.g. set up a Facebook Page (example of best practice:
http://www.facebook.com/government#/usdos), then the YouTube video channel should be
part of it, and also the mediaRSS feed from a potential government video publishing system
should be presented there. Facebook is the dominant social network in Australia and it is
possible to reach users of all age groups there and provide additional customer service there.

It is important to keep track of results on social networks through Web and video analytics.
Some existing web analytics tool (e.g. Omniture, WebTrends, and Google Analytics) provide
metrics on self-hosted videos. For video published to social networks, other tools are necessary.
YouTube provides YouTube Insights for videos published through YouTube. Other service
providers allow tracking across multiple channels, e.g. TubeMogul or VQmetrics. Depending on
how video is published, it needs to be tracked and measured appropriately.
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8. MODELS OF IMPLEMENTATION
INTRODUCTION
A whole of government video service can mean many things to different people. In this report we do
not want to exclude any of these ideas, but we do want to stay focused on the above cited needs by
government agencies, the users of their content, and government administration.
Our focus here is on content for publishing and not on general video use in government, which will
extend to using video for communication between individuals and groups within and outside
government. However, recordings of such video communications can and should be the source of
content to be published through some of the means that we describe here.
Also, we do not analyse the particular solution necessary for a large-volume recording, streaming
and publishing services such as would be necessary for parliamentary video. In this context, we
would only like to point out to the above presented MetaVid open source system as a best practice
for parliamentary video.
Our approach in this section is to describe pure architectural models in order to clarify the software
needs and costing. The recommendation will then be based on an integrated view of all these
models.
OVERVIEW OF MODELS
What could a government video solution mean? These are the different models that we will analyse:

Video publishing platforms (centralised or distributed solution)

Centralised Video aggregation platform

Video publicity platform (centralised or distributed solution)

Video archiving platform (centralised or distributed solution)
The following subsection will analyse each one of these models in turn.
VIDEO PUBLISHING PLATFORMS
A government agency has several different system options when trying to use a video publishing
platform:

Video Content Management System (CMS)
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
Integration into existing Web CMS

Hosted Video Service
INSTALLATION OF A VIDEO CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (CMS)
A Video Content Management System (CMS) allows managing video content on your own media
servers in your own computing environment.

Centralised vs. Distributed – the alternatives
 Every agency might decide to install their own, different Video CMS solution and take care
of their own storage and delivery infrastructure. In this case, we end up with a vastly
different user experience across different government agencies and incompatible features
between the sites, making it rather difficult to aggregate such videos in a meaningful
manner centrally, to other social networks, or even into a video archive. This approach has
all the advantages and disadvantages of a decentralised solution.
 A centralised Video CMS can be installed that every agency has to use/ is free to use with a
single central media storage and delivery infrastructure. In this case, we end up with a
system where the administrators of the central site have all the control, have to provide all
the support, and have to manage the infrastructure scaling with typically incomplete
information. This approach has all the advantages and disadvantages of a centralised and,
from an agency point of view, mostly outsourced solution.
 A Video CMS solution can be purchased that every agency installs itself on its own media
storage and delivery infrastructure. The advantage over leaving the choice of software to the
agencies is that central support can be provided and that central aggregation is simplified,
since all agencies offer the same API. There is duplication in administration across different
agencies, but since everyone runs the same system, that administrative effort will be lower.
This approach has all the advantages and disadvantages of a federated solution.

Build vs. Buy – the options
 A Video CMS solution can be acquired from a commercial provider. This has the advantage
that there is a company behind it that is responsible for fixing bugs, developing new
features, and providing updates. It has the disadvantage of becoming dependent on a
commercial provider whose products may not fully satisfy the needs of the agencies without
a real possibility to enforce development of the required features.
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 An open source Video CMS solution can be used. Unless there exists an administration
group within government to roll out such a system and provide support, one would contract
a local commercial entity that can provide the support, including training and the
development of new features, bug fixes, and software updates. The advantage is that all
required features can be developed and added on as required. Also, there is no dependency
on the local commercial entity – if their service falls through, others will be around to work
with the software since it is open source.
 A video CMS could be built from scratch. This is quite a substantial undertaking for a
government agency and would only make sense if there are no products in the market that
come close to satisfying the requirements. The disadvantage of this approach is the typically
much higher cost and effort involved in specifying and developing a system from scratch.
The advantage is that a well designed and developed custom solution will provide for all the
requirements and for full control over extensibility.
If a custom solution is indeed requested, it makes more sense to work from an open source system
to avoid having to start completely from scratch. Also, if indeed a custom solution was designed
from scratch, it would be best to partner with a commercial entity that can later take the system to
market for other users.
INTEGRATION OF VIDEO INTO AN EXISTING CMS
Depending on what system an agency already uses for publishing Web content, it may be possible to
integrate video into it.

Does the existing Web CMS of an agency provide for video publishing and does it satisfy the
listed requirements? If an agency uses their existing CMS for video content also, the question of
archiving becomes an issue. The CMS should expose a mechanism for other systems to federate
the metadata and content into an aggregation and an archiving system.

Is it possible to write a plugin for the CMS to hook it into the functionality provided by a
(possibly central) video CMS? An agency that already runs a Web CMS should not have to also
run a video CMS. Instead, they should be able to have extensions for their existing CMS that
make the functionality of a central video CMS available to the local CMS.

At minimum, is it possible to cut and paste HTML snippets into the CMS with embed code for
videos from a different video CMS? If the last question cannot be answered affirmatively, the
agency will have to consider changing their CMS for Web publishing altogether in order to allow
for video (re-)publishing. Since all modern CMSs allow for insertion of HTML snippets, this should
not be a problem.
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
Apart from making video embeddable into agency Websites, it is also important to actually allow
targeted search and browsing of video within an agency Website. If not natively available within
the agency CMS, such functionality can be provided through a separate Web page, which is
created by aggregating all video information from the agency site.
USE OF A HOSTED VIDEO SERVICE
Most video publishing services follow the Software as a Service (SaaS) model and provide video
hosting functionality on a remote server with capabilities to embed the videos into Web pages in an
existing CMS. While the videos are managed on the remote site, which includes their metadata and
their metrics, the existing CMS only has to take care of a small snippet of HTML code in its Web
pages and is relieved from worrying about the videos.

Advantages - Disadvantages
(+) Key functionality is available, including upload, transcoding, video player, and metrics.
(+) Functionality is well tested and tends to be reliable (at vendor service levels).
(+) No need to build out own infrastructure.
(+) No need to build and deploy own software solution.
(+) No need to worry about scalability.
(+) No need to worry about bandwidth cost planning.
(+) No need to worry about service reliability.
(-) Reliance on a service that may have downtime at unsuitable times.
(-) Dependence on the look-and-feel of the available video player(s).
(-) Dependence on the available functionality, e.g. limited accessibility – there is no general
means to extend functionality.
(-) Dependence on a vendor.

Free vs. Commercial
 Hosted video services that also function as social networks usually offer their basic hosting
services for free. Using such a service makes for a very simple and low-cost solution.
Advantages – Disadvantages
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Whole of Government Video Service 2009
(+) Free service.
(+) Typically comes with socialisation functionality (sharing, Facebook, Twitter etc)
(+) Typically easy to achieve discoverability and good SEO.
(+) Typically simple to set up and easy to use.
(-) Typically riddled with advertising which is the business model of free services.
(-) Typically comes with a branded video player that advertises the third party service.
(-) Typically, submitted content is given away under a broad license that allows the third
party service broad usage rights.
(-) Limited to the features of the chosen service.
(-) May imply endorsement of a third party service.
 Other social video networks provide both, a free and a premium service. The premium
service often includes the use of private videos, which do not have to be made public.
Typically, prices tend to be smaller than with proper commercial video hosting services, but
the functionality may also be more targeted towards consumers – e.g. insufficient metrics,
no video player skinning.
 Finally, commercial hosted video services provide a video hosting solution with many
features and none or only little socialisation aspects.
Advantages – Disadvantages
(+) Commercial service with defined service level agreements.
(+) Typically good support.
(+) Typically allows for branding and video player skinning of the service.
(-) Typically reliant on external services for discoverability, such as a site-wide search
engine.
(-) Typically expensive service.
(-) Typically poor integration with socialisation platforms (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter etc).
CENTRAL VIDEO AGGREGATION PLATFORMS
Citizens that go to e.g. the URL http://video.gov.au/ will expect to be able to find access to all videos
that government has published. But how can this access be provided?
In the simplest version, this site may just be a video search engine, which provides access to all the
videos indexed from any agency’s website and from agency’s other public Web presences, such as
YouTube or Vimeo channels. Such a search engine is built by aggregating metadata about all
government published video in a central database, indexing that database and making the index
available for search.
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2009 Whole of Government Video Service
There is no video actually hosted at the aggregation (sometimes also called “syndication”) site. Only
the metadata found about the videos (possibly through mediaRSS feeds) is copied and organised in a
standard manner. Also, the search results can be presented in a uniform manner giving all
government published video a common styling. Typically, a click-through to related material, such as
the host page of the video or the article in which it was published, is also displayed for videos. This
will lead back to the publishing agency and provide a further source of audience to them.
This can be taken one step further by introducing categorisation on the videos. Often, keywords or
categories are already available for a video to decide what government-defined category it should
be part of. Then, the aggregation site can also provide a browsing interface to its aggregate videos,
which allows people to browse through government videos by government category. Related
categories / keywords can also link to further video content.

Build vs. Buy
 There are a few hosted video aggregation services available (as SaaS – software as a service).
 It is not difficult to build an aggregation site from scratch – the effort is very much akin to
building a mash-up site. This is why there are no commercial products available. Most of the
required code is available as open source libraries. A relatively small consulting contract can
build the system using e.g. MySQL, and some ruby code for data scraping/mediaRSS parsing
on the backend with possibly PHP or Ruby on Rails code on the front end. The challenge will
be to locate all government video content in a diverse CMS environment.
VIDEO PUBLICITY PLATFORMS
The dominant video publicity platform on the Web is YouTube. It is the second largest search engine
on the Web – directly behind Google search. More people type queries into YouTube than into
Yahoo or Bing. In addition, YouTube video results are favoured within Google search results and thus
get an unfair SEO advantage compared to any other content on the Web. All this means that video
that is published on YouTube receives an unfair publicity advantage over video published on any
other website, and that includes other social networks as well as any private video CMS solution.
This advantage should be exploited.

YouTube vs. Other Social Networks
 Given that YouTube is the dominant video publicity platform on the Web, the main
publicity effort for certain videos on the Web should be to publish (or re-publish) these on
YouTube.
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 YouTube has attraction for the general Web audience. When targeting specific audiences,
however, YouTube may not be the best means. For example, young males are better
targeted on sites such as Break.com, or a European audience is better targeted on
Dailymotion.com. Every video with an important and targeted message may need particular
treatment on top of being published to YouTube.
 Further publicity can be achieved through a good mix of social engagement platforms, e.g.
use of Facebook pages, Twitter channels, Del.icio.us, etc. It is not the aim of this document
to develop a social engagement platform mix, but there is some overlap with such an
endeavour. Video can both be used to enrich a social engagement strategy, as well as be the
core content to be driven through such a strategy.

Central vs. Distributed
 Just as most Australian government websites have a well defined focus, videos produced by
an agency will be well focused around a specific initiative/area of work, too. Thus, it is only
reasonable for there to be multiple YouTube channels for the government videos.
 A central Australian government YouTube channel is also a sensible addition to the
government’s YouTube presence. Just like the US government have launched a central
channel, that links through to all the other government agency channels, a similar initiative
will be a great means of grouping the channels together in the public eye and finding out
about government video content on YouTube.
A video publicity strategy should really include all of the above approaches. Since publication to
social networks is generally a low-cost exercise and only costs the effort to do it, all adequate
avenues for publicity should be used. Please note that even when using social networks for
publication, there may be some further cost involved in creating captions if not done in-house.
Fortunately, YouTube provides some very good tools to help simplify fulfilling these needs.

YouTube and Accessibility
 YouTube now provides some of the most sophisticated methods for creating captions and
subtitles: it is only necessary to create a mere transcripts and the timing for the captions will
be calculated automatically by YouTube’s tools. It should therefore be prescribed to
Australian government agencies that upload videos to YouTube to provide such transcripts
and use the YouTube automatic timing functionality to create captions from them.
 YouTube has as yet no solution for the needs of vision-impaired users other than encoding
audio descriptions together with the main sound of the video. Since this is suboptimal for
non-vision-impaired users, it is not a recommended process. It is therefore best to also
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publish the full transcript as simple description text on YouTube videos – thus, screen
readers are at least able to provide a read-out of the spoken video content.
VIDEO ARCHIVING PLATFORMS
Records are a part of the information/knowledge asset base which is being regarded, increasingly, as
a major organisational asset in organisations and government. Australian government agencies have
a mandate to keep records of their work and to archive digital artefacts in high source quality for
prosperity with the National Archives of Australia. It is also part of the National Archives’ work to
define the metadata necessary to maintain around a digital asset.
The National Archives already have to deal with the requirement to archive video. There is probably
already a system in place to do such for websites, including video in the Websites.

If there is an introduction of a video CMS either in the agencies or centrally, it would certainly be
necessary for the National Archives to include such a CMS into their digital archiving efforts.
At the same time, the agencies have to make sure to fulfil record keeping requirements around
the video production and publishing process. These can be made part of the functionality of the
CMS.

If there was to be an introduction of social video channels for agencies, e.g. on YouTube, it
would certainly be necessary for the National Archives to include such public video into their
digital archiving efforts. Fortunately, most social video networks provide mediaRSS or a similar
XML feed for video channels, which can help extracting the videos and metadata, including the
originally uploaded video format.

If there was to be a video aggregation site such as discussed above, and that video aggregation
site exposes a mediaRSS feed, it would also make it even easier for the National Archives to
locate all government video and archive it.

The largest challenge for the National Archives will be to actually receive the source material for
digitally born video and audio – i.e. get access to the tapes, DVDs, CDs etc that contain the
footage from the shooting, and also the high-quality output from a digital editing process. This
can be solved if the archiving process is integrated into a general workflow which takes a hold of
the material from the start.
SUMMARY
This section has analysed in separation the different pure architectural models of the software
systems that can be used to satisfy different types of requirements on a Government video solution.
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An actual implementation may and should best consist of a mix of these models depending on the
actual goals of the implementation project.
As there are agencies that have challenges in publishing video, it makes sense to offer a whole-ofgovernment video upload and publishing solution.
This solution can also publish through to a centralized citizen access to government video – or
alternatively an independent aggregation solution is created that can syndicate video from all places
through which government publishes.
Further, if there are government-wide publicity videos, setup of a government-wide YouTube
channel makes sense – combined with links through to agency YouTube channels.
Decisions within an agency on what to do to solve the video issue can actually take a fairly logical
course. The following decision tree can lend a helping hand to such agencies decisions. It focuses on
making a technical decision about what publishing means an agency should set up:
Decision Tree for Government Agencies for a video solution
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Note that we are not in a position to propose what videos should go up where - that is a publicity
and political decision and should be made on a case-by-case basis where it's non-obvious, but
trusting or empowering the person who publishes the videos online to make the decision. There is
thus plenty of work necessary to educate/train the relevant people in agencies both technically and
from an ideas point of view.
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9. TECHNOLOGY
INTRODUCTION
Some technical background knowledge is required in order to make a good decision about the best
system architecture and the technical components to choose to realize the video system
architecture.
This section provides a basic video technology background. Then it lists products and open source
solutions that can be used to provide for each of the above discussed architectural systems.
BASICS
The knowledge aggregated in this section is required as background information when implementing
a new video solution – it will help determine the different necessary components and pricing for
them.
When going with an existing solution – be that proprietary or open source – most of these
technology decisions have been made and integrated into the product. It is still important to
understand these components, since there may be a need to adapt components of existing systems
– e.g. existing CMSs or even the selected video solution. Then, this section provides valuable
background information.
VIDEO AND AUDIO FORMATS
There are many proprietary, standardised and free formats available for publishing video and audio
to the Web. Some of the main video formats are Adobe FLV, Windows Media Video, QuickTime,
MPEG-4, and Ogg Theora. Some of the main audio formats are Adobe FLV, Windows Media Audio,
QuickTime, MPEG-4 AAC, MPEG-1 MP3 and Ogg Vorbis.
Some of these are actually container formats and can encapsulate more than one codec – the latest
Adobe FLV for example carries H.264 video and HE-AAC audio, both MPEG-4 codecs. Before this,
Adobe FLV contained typically VP6 (On2 Technologies’ video codec) and MP3 (MPEG-1 audio
codec)7. Similarly, MPEG-4 codecs live inside Windows Media or QuickTime files. Ogg is a new
container format and typically carries freely licensed and open codecs Theora, Vorbis, Speex, Dirac,
FLAC, or CELT. It can in theory also carry H.264, but is not typically used for that.
7
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Video
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Of all these formats, the only really open and free formats are Ogg Theora and Vorbis. The Microsoft
Windows Media codecs and the QuickTime Sorenson codecs are proprietary codecs. The MPEG
codecs are standardised and specifications are available, but royalty payments apply. This is also true
for the MPEG-4 H.264 codec, which is currently available for free when used for free Internet
Broadcast, but royalties will need to start being paid from 1st January 20118.
From a quality per bitrate point of view, H.264 is currently the best available video codec, closely
followed by Theora. Dirac targets large resolution footage and can overtake H.264 in that space,
which is more for TV or movie theatres than online. VP6 is a little behind by now, but the newer
proprietary VP9 codec will compete with H.264. Microsoft’s VC1 will compete with Theora on quality
per bitrate.
For audio formats, one distinguishes between general audio and speech. ACC is probably the best
general-purpose current codec at quality per bitrate, followed by Vorbis and MP3. Speex and G.722
are typical for Voice over IP applications. FLAC and MPEG-4 LAS are in use for lossless audio
compression.
Online, Adobe FLV, MPEG-4, and Ogg matter most as encapsulation formats with their respective
codecs. Ogg is expected to become the commodity codec of the future with the HTML5 video and
audio elements. FLV with MPEG-4 codecs is the de-facto standard online right now – MPEG-4 will
probably continue to be used by large content publishes as a high-performance codec with
additional DRM, watermarking and other features.
TRADITIONAL BROWSER SUPPORT OF A/V FORMATS
At this point in time, we have to look at what widely deployed browsers support. This may change
quickly with the spread of HTML5, about which we will talk more in the next segment.
For Adobe FLV to be used on websites, the Adobe Flash browser plugin is required, which is installed
in roughly 99% of all browsers.
The Microsoft Silverlight browser plugin is typically used to publish Windows Media content on
modern websites. It is installed in roughly 48% of all browsers.
To play QuickTime content on general Web pages, the QuickTime browser plugin needs to be
installed. No numbers are available about the installed base of the QuickTime browser plugin.
8
http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/46/1/H264-Royalties-what-you-need-to-know/
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To play Ogg file on general Web pages, the Cortado java player is typically used in traditional
browsers. Java is installed in roughly 56% of all browsers.
So, the most widely supported codec in Browsers at this stage is Adobe FLV.
HTML5 BROWSERS AND A/V FORMATS
The latest development in Web technology is the new HTML5 standard. It is still in development, but
many of the modern browsers have already implemented parts of it. The part that we are
particularly interested in are the new HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements. They bring native
support for audio and video content into the browser without a need to install browser plugins.
The HTML5 standard at this stage does not prescribe a common baseline audio or video codec that
has to be supported by all browser vendors for the new elements. Therefore, browser vendors have
made diverse decisions on what codecs to support natively. Typically, they have chosen either Ogg
Theora/Vorbis support or MPEG-4 H.264/AAC support.
Browser with HTML5 support
Codecs supported
Note
Chrome, since version 3.0
(September 2009)
Ogg Theora/Vorbis, H.264, AAC,
MPEG-4
Broadest codec support
Firefox/Mozilla, since version
3.5 (August 2009)
Ogg Theora/Vorbis
H.264, AAC and MP3 support
can be speculated on, though
with much pain
Safari/Webkit, since version 3.1
(March 2008)
QuickTime, MPEG-4
Install XiphQT QuickTime
component to gain Ogg
Theora/Vorbis support
Internet Explorer
No <video> or <audio> support
Speculated that MS started
implementing <video> and
<audio> support and that it
may be ready for IE9, but
nothing has been announced. It
can also be speculated that
they will follow the path of
Apple and provide native
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2009 Whole of Government Video Service
support for Windows Media
and for MPEG-4, but not for
Ogg Theora/Vorbis. An ActiveX
control to provide Ogg
Theora/Vorbis support in IE is in
development.
Opera
Experimental build of <video>
and <audio> with Ogg
Theora/Vorbis support
A beta release is upcoming.
Overall, roughly 40% of all browsers support Ogg Theora/Vorbis at this stage.
OTHER FORMAT ISSUES
When YouTube became the star amongst video hosting sites, it created a default standard for the
size of video published on the Web. This was in about 2007 and the default standard was SD
(Standard Definition video) in 320x240 pixels, giving an aspect ratio of 4:3 and a bitrate of 350Kbps
to 500 Kbps9.
Since then, further formats have been commonly used, including:

SD 480i (640x480 pixels, 4:3) – bitrate of 500Kbps to 1.5Mbps

HD 720p (1280x720 pixels, 16:9) – bitrate of 1 Mbps to 5Mbps

HD 1080p (1920x1080 pixels, 16:9) – bitrate of 2Mbps to 10Mbps
YouTube only released HD (High Definition video) at 1080p resolution on 12th November 200910.This
is also the quality that is being used on Digital TV for broadcasting.
In an Australian context we have to consider that the maximum available bandwidth via ADSL+ right
now is roughly 24Mbps, so high quality video can be deployed. However, many Web users who live
in outlying areas can only access poor connectivity, excluding them from online video altogether.
9
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/apps/flv_bitrate_calculator/index.html
10
http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/11/1080p-hd-comes-to-youtube.html
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Most Australians are, however, now able to reach 14 Mbps via Telstra’s "Next G" HSPA wireless
network, making video streaming at higher quality possible11.
We recommend publishing where possible video in HD 720p format, since those Australians that are
on “broadband” will have 8 - 24Mbps. The HD 1080p quality may be achievable with the rollout of
the National Broadband Network.
CROSS-DEVICE VIDEO
Thus far, we have concentrated on publishing video to the Web. However, the modern world is one
of diverse devices where Web content is delivered to different screens. This introduces extra
challenges to the content provider. Here, we only briefly mention mobile devices and IP Television as
additional target platforms for video content.

On the Web, the current standard format is Adobe FLV with the H.264 video codec and the AAC
or MP3 audio codec; within a few years, we expect HTML5 will take this place, which currently
uses either MPEG-4 (H.264, AAC) or Ogg (Theora, Vorbis) video.

On IP TV, the current standard format is MPEG-4 (H.264, AAC), typically with a higher resolution
than for the Web – 1080p is the aim.

On general mobile devices such as the iPhone, other smart phones, or iPod, the typical standard
is 3GPP or 3GPP2. 3GPP provides MPEG-4, H.263, and AAC or AMR for audio. 3GPP2 provides
MPEG-4, H.263, or H.264 for video, and AAC, AMR, or QCELP for audio.
The iPod, for example, takes MPEG-4 H.264 video up to a size of 640x480 pixels and AAC audio
in MPEG-4 and QuickTime containers.
When trying to support multiple devices, it is recommended to provide a selection of source files each
targeted at a particular device market. Special systems may be necessary to provide video publishing
functionality to specific platforms, since content re-formatting may be necessary, e.g.
http://www.azukisystems.com/ for Mobile, or http://www.irdeto.com/ for IP TV.
With HTML5, this selection is being made available through the <source> elements inside the <video>
or <audio> element. Otherwise, implementation of a script is necessary that will choose the correct
source file based on device reported capabilities.
11
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Australia
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AUDIO/VIDEO FORMAT RECOMMENDATION
There is no doubt that HTML5 <video> and <audio> are the future of on online media. These
elements will make it much easier to work with video and audio content on the Web and are even
expected to provide a built-in markup for captions and subtitles, potentially even text-based audio
descriptions that can be read by a screenreader, thus solving the basic accessibility needs right
through the standard. Looking exclusively at the conditions around codec formats and disregarding
availability of commercial and open source solutions for the above listed architectural models, it is
therefore tempting to recommend use of HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements.
When we inspect the current state of standardisation of <video> and <audio>, the still very patchy
browser support, and the low number of solutions available that provide for the above listed
architectural models using HTML5 <audio> and <video>, it is prudent to consider the commercial
market for HTML5 not yet ready at this point in time. This situation is, however, bound to change
very quickly and may be completely turned on its head in 6 months.
Our recommendation has to be dependent on the time at which an architectural model is planned to
be realised. At the current time, we would recommend to use an Adobe FLV based solution. Adobe
Flash has the largest uptake and with YouTube using it, Adobe Flash has become a de-facto standard
for publishing video on the Web. Right now, YouTube and Dailymotion – the two largest social video
networks – are undertaking experiments with HTML5 video – we will see online hosting sites move
to html5 video faster than we might expect.
Therefore, this recommendation needs to be re-assessed in about 6 months. It then needs to be
determined whether HTML5 media support has improved in the browsers and whether vendors have
started offering solutions using the new <video> and <audio> elements for publishing.
Also note that if a decision was to be made to create a Government audio and video system from
scratch, we would recommend using HTML5 <audio> and <video> with the Ogg Theora and Vorbis
codecs simply because there will never be a requirement to pay royalties for the use and for
publishing Ogg Theora and Vorbis encoded content, whereas the same does not hold true for MPEG4 and other codecs.
ENCODING AND TRANSCODING
Every video system that requires uploading and publishing needs to solve the issue of encoding and
transcoding video from the upload or ingest format to the publishing and possibly even to the
archiving format.
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For encoding into Adobe FLV or MPEG-4, there are several choices for encoding software:

Adobe Flash CS4 Professional (Desktop version): A$1,415.00 inc GST

On2 Flix Encoder Pro (Desktop version): US$249 per seat, or
On2 Flix Encoder Engine (server version): approx US$3,000.00 per server

FFMpeg (server & desktop): $0 – mature open source software – used by YouTube

Other less well known software:
 Total Video Converter 3.5 (Desktop): US$350 (site license)
 Video Sharing Script (Server): US$600 per server
 Conaito Video2Flash SDK (Server): US$499 per server
 Flash Video MX SDK V2 (Server): US$1,000 per computer
 Turbine Video Engine SDK: US$1,495 to develop server app, US$4,995 to develop desktop
app
 Squeeze 6 from Sorenson: Encoding software $499 (for Flash)
There are now also some Web services (SaaS) that provide encoding on a per-use price:

http://www.encoding.com/: US$19 - $299/moth for 1GB – 75GB of encoding capacity

http://www.ankoder.com/ (AU product): US$2 per GB in + US$2 per GB out

http://heywatch.com/ : US$0.04 for first 45min of encoding, US$0.04 for every successive 15min
for HD and 2-pass encoding
Ogg Theora/Vorbis encoding software is open source and called ffmpeg2theora.
Our recommendation is that if a video solution is to be created from scratch for Adobe FLV, it should
be created on a Linux server and run the free FFMpeg software, which is incidentally also in use by
YouTube.
If, however, agency-specific Web CMSs are to be extended with video functionality, we recommend
using a SaaS service such as Ankoder which avoids having to create agency-specific transcoding
infrastructure.
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INFRASTRUCTURE AND HOSTING REQUIREMENTS FOR PUBLISHING VIDEO
There is a large misconception amongst some agencies as to the actual costs involved month to
month in publishing online video. With one agency quoted as saying
"We do not have a million dollars a month to spend on video."
While video publishing is more expensive than traditional website hosting, the actual costs involved
have been for the most part greatly exaggerated. To put the million dollar number into perspective,
let’s see what kind of a site can be run by spending a million dollar a month.
We will here look at YouTube costs as they are known and confirmed from 2006. No official numbers
are known about current costs, so these three year old numbers will need to suffice to face the fear
and uncertainty that is being spread about the real cost of hosting video. We know the following
about YouTube in October of 2006, before it was acquired by Google12:

YouTube had an estimated 100 million video downloads per day which equates to 3,000 million
downloads per month.

YouTube was using Limelight Networks as their Content Distribution Network provider.

Limelight’s monthly revenue was $4.7M USD/month, out of which YouTube is estimated to have
made up 25%.
Bandwidth cost is the main cost involved with publishing video. We can thus fairly safely assume
that the monthly cost to run the 100 million video gorilla YouTube was above US$1M but probably
not more than US$3M per month.
Unless there are agencies who believe they can have the kind of audience YouTube did in 2006, the
million dollar number is mostly born out misinformation. So, let’s clarify these numbers.
Here, we will work with two example agencies.
The first one is a small agency that publishes a fair number of videos a year, but doesn’t get that
much interest – it is modelled on something like the US Government Accountability Office’s YouTube
channel, but we have increased the number of videos and views to give a good baseline number.
12
See http://www.limelightnetworks.com/2006/05/limelight-networks-reports-continuing-strong-growth/ and
http://willy.boerland.com/myblog/youtube_bandwidth_usage_25_petabytes_per_month
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The second one is a large agency that publishes a large number of videos a year and attracts a lot of
interest – modelled on something like the NASA YouTube channel.
EXAMPLE 1: DEPARTMENT OF PAPER CLIPS (DOP)
This department is solely responsible for regulation around the use of paper clips in the community
and ensuring they are the right shape and colour. They regularly post one or two videos a month on
their website. These videos are for community updates and announcements and are usually two to
five minutes in length. The department also hosts a quarterly public Paper Clip forum. These forums
have 10-20 speakers and the 20-45 minute presentations are uploaded to a special section of the
Website.
The department has a small regular following of viewers and it's regular updates receive from 2001000 views while its conference videos being more reference material receive around 100-200
views.
After a year of activity the department has the following videos

24 - 3 minute videos (Regular updates), with 7,500 total views

40 - 20 minute videos with 3,000 total views

10 - 60 minutes videos with 1,000 views
Minutes of video stored: 1,472
Minutes of video watched: 142,500 per year
EXAMPLE 2: UNDERGROUND COLONISATION AGENCY (UCA)
The UCA is the second generation of the Underground Exploration Agency (UEA) – while initially
responsible for manned underground digs it is now responsible for a colonisation attempt at the
earth’s core. Diggernaughts vodcast regularly about their training and journeys to the centre of the
earth. There are also many mini documentaries made about all the technology and missions.
There is a vast amount of public interest around the work the agency is carrying out which means
that the UCA has the most viewed videos due the ground breaking work it is involved in. Its weekly
summary videos have 5,000 views, while special events may receive up to 800,000 views, giving on
average 300,000 views per month.
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2009 Whole of Government Video Service
After a year of activity the department has the following videos

700 - 3 minute videos (Diggernaught vodcasts), 2,000,000 total views

50 - 5 minute videos (Regular updates), with 1,000,000 total views

100 - 20 minute videos with 300,000 total views

10 - 60 minutes videos with 30,000 total views
Minutes of video stored: 4,950
Minutes of video watched: 18,800,000 per year
STORAGE REQUIREMENTS
Here we are calculating example storage requirements using the two agencies above to get a
bracket from minimum to maximum requirements on a per agency basis.
We assume that for each video uploaded we need to store 6 separate files.

the original video

transcoded OGG for HTML5 playback, standard and high definition

transcoded FLV for flash playback, standard and high definition

transcoded 3GPP for mobile phone playback
This assumes that we want to be forward-looking with our infrastructure and provide for the
possibility of serving Ogg format videos in an HTML5 video element.
Captions, transcripts, and thumbnails will also need to be stored but since they pale in comparison
to the size of the video, we will ignore them for this exercise.
The quality of the original videos will most likely range from extremely poor 3:4 SD video to DVD
quality 16:9 HD 1080p. We assume a fairly random sampling of videos across these sizes to calculate
the numbers below. Some bias is included with the assumption that the UCA in general has higher
quality original video as some of it is used for broadcast media and DVDs.
We assume an average encoded rate of 2Mbps for the original videos.
We transcoded the videos at 500kbps for the SD version and 2Mbps for HD version.
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We thus arrive at a total of required storage at the end of the first year of
DoP = 76GB
UCA = 257GB
Note that we are not talking about a significant amount of storage, independent of whether this
would be hosted internally by a department, on a hosted dedicated server with a large amount of
disk, or in a virtual storage environment. For the internal storage scenario this data easily fits on a
$100 SATA disk. If we look at an expensive hosted solution where premium SAN disk might be sold at
$1/GB13, then we are looking at monthly costs of
DoP = $76/month
UCA = $257/month
These numbers include backup and high availability when purchased from a provider offering SANbased storage solution.
TRANSCODING REQUIREMENTS
On a 2 year old Intel Core Duo laptop SD video can be encoded at about 1:1 while HD video can be
encoded at about 2:1 (i.e. twice real time). For every minute of video uploaded, approximately 7
minutes of real CPU time are required. With multiple processors and cores available on most
modern servers this allows for multiple streams to be transcoded at once.
Even for the larger UCA agency, roughly 5,000 minutes of video a year need to be transcoded, which
equates to 3 days of CPU time. So a single server is more than up to the task of transcoding all the
video for a number of agencies.
For cases where many hours of video need to be uploaded for a single event and be made available
quickly it may well be necessary to spin up further transcoding servers. There are also web services
which can be used for transcoding on an as-need basis, see above.
BANDWIDTH REQUIREMENTS
There are two aspects to take into consideration when calculating the bandwidth required for
hosting video.
13
Indicative pricing was gathered from Bulletproof Networks, AC3, Hostworks, Web Central
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2009 Whole of Government Video Service
The first is the actual available bandwidth at the hosting site, i.e. the size of the pipe. This places a
limitation on the number of concurrent streams that can be viewed. In Australia most hosting
providers charge on the basis of bandwidth used, not the size of the link and have a minimum of
100Mbps connections.
In the examples we are examining, even a 50Mbps link would allow for 25 HD streams or 100
simultaneous SD streams. So we will not take this factor into consideration here as we are not
aiming to stream live events to hundreds of viewers and can thus satisfy typical agency needs out of
any typical provider link.
The second consideration and the most important is the amount of data which is used, as this
usually has a direct correlation to cost.
If we assume that streams default to SD and that 30% of viewers switch to a HD stream then based
on the examples above we would see the following bandwidth usage over a year.
DoP = 992GB/year = 83GB/month
UCA = 131TB/year = 11TB/month
Most hosting providers will charge for inbound bandwidth rather than for outbound bandwidth. The
current inbound rate is approximately 2c/MB14 in Australia. At a typical 10:1 ratio this equates to
0.2c/MB for outbound traffic. On that basis we would see.
DoP = $165/month
UCA = $21,802/month
Alternatively it is possible to purchase traffic at a flat rate by the Mbps. The current rate is about
$200/Mbps, which is about 10 times as much as the US cost. This alternative doesn't necessarily
make sense for the DoP since it would be risky to run such a site with less than 5Mbps per second
since you need to be able to meet peak demands and this would already cost $1,000.
The UCA on the other hand requires a minimum of 34Mbps to meet the average utilisation. If you
add 50% to this to handle peak demand then you end up with a cheaper rate of $15,000 per month:
DoP = $165/month
UCA = $15,000/month
14
Indicative pricing was gathered from Bulletproof Networks, AC3, Hostworks, Web Central
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These numbers are calculated under the assumption that the videos are hosted in Australia. If the
videos are hosted on US servers or in a US cloud or CDN then these prices can be reduce by a factor
of 10.
SERVER SOFTWARE
Ogg Theora/Vorbis does not require a special Web server. However, it is recommended to extend a
normal Web Server such as Apache with an open source and freely available CGI script extension
called oggz-chop to provide for some speed improvements on delivery of Ogg Theora/Vorbis content
to Web browsers, such as faster loading and direct access to time offsets.
Similarly, to work well, Adobe FLV requires special server software. Software alternatives are:

Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5 : US$4,500 per server

Adobe Flash Media Streaming Server: US$995 per server – more targeted at progressive
download

Wowza Media Server Pro: US$995 per server

Red5: $0 – open source Flash Server software – mostly used for live streaming applications
(using the RTP or RTMP protocols rather than HTTP)

HTTP server plus a script: $0 – open source modules to provide direct seeking to time offsets
providing pseudo streaming
There are also services from CDNs and hosting companies available, which include the price for
serving Adobe Flash15. Pricing is on a per-use basis, for example:

Wowza Pro for EC2: US$0.12 in/out per GB

Influxis: US$9.95 – US$895 per month for 10GB – 2TB of bandwidth

LimelightSTREAM: unpublished, but estimated to be about US$0.30 per GB - CDN for large and
worldwide content distribution

Akamai: unpublished, but estimated to be about US$0.30 per GB - CDN for large and worldwide
content distribution
15
http://www.flashcomguru.com/articles/hosts.cfm
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For hosting video, no support for live streaming is actually required. So, the only functionality that a
Adobe FLV server needs to provide is pseudo streaming functionality. Thus, we recommend using
open source software if a video solution is to be created from scratch for Adobe FLV. It is both cheap
and effective, and matches the solution that YouTube chose.
Similarly, for Ogg Theora/Vorbis we recommend using the open source and free software oggz-chop
to provide similar pseudo streaming functionality for Ogg content.
If indeed a Adobe FLV streaming server solution is necessary in order to provide live streaming
support, a good discussion of when to choose the original Adobe software or a third-party hosting
provider can be found at
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashmediaserver/articles/fms_hosting.html.
PLAYER SOFTWARE
When using HTML5 and Ogg Theora/Vorbis, each Web browser provides a video player with default
controls. There is no support for playlists out of the box. However, since HTML5 is part of the Web
Browser, JavaScript for extending functionality and CSS for styling are available to the Web
developer. This provides a very flexible environment for publishing video.
When using Adobe FLV for a custom developed video solution, a video player needs to be developed
in Adobe Flash or Flex in order to provide all the video playback functionality in the Web Browser. A
Adobe Flash or Flex developer can also provide custom functionality such as playlist playback or
styling, but it has to be developed in ActionScript and not through usual Web technology.
To help this situation, several pre-compiled FLV video players are available online. Here is a short list
of some of the available software – selected from a much larger set because these have subtitling
functionality implemented:

Flowplayer with the caption plugin: US$395 multidomain license

JWplayer: US$225 base license for 25 sites, additional modules available for skins, Google
Analytics etc

FLVplayer: US$65 multidomain license
When setting up a video service from scratch, we recommend using the JWplayer or Flowplayer. Not
only do these provide a wide variety of features – including caption support, skinning support, a
comprehensive JavaScript API, and playlist support – but their source code is also available, so if
some adaptation has to be made, it can be done fairly easily. We recommend against building a new
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FLV player from scratch, since the required features take a long time to implement and many bugs
will need to be overcome. Those listed here have reached a very high maturity level.
For HTML5, we recommend simply re-using the default skinning and add custom styling through CSS.
The advantage of the default skin is that it will support accessibility features natively, such as
keyboard control of the video transport bar.
VIDEO METRICS
To determine the success of published videos requires measuring their audience and engagement.
At the simplest level, video metrics are no different to Web analytics: it is necessary to measure the
number of views, the duration of the view, unique views, the number of returns, segment the
audience by gender, age, and country, find paths through the Website that include the videos, etc.
However, since video and audio are time-based resources, it is also important to notice not just how
long a viewer has consumed the resource, but also which parts of it he/she has consumed. This helps
identify the hot spots and the dead parts of a resource, and provide feedback to the video creator
who can use this information to improve the content.
Web analytics tools available for video are:

Free tool: Google Analytics: also JavaScript-based Web page statistics collector; Google Analytics
further provides a Flash API, so direct tracking of events in e.g. Flash video players is possible to
e.g. gain hotspots (e.g. in use for JWplayer16)

Free tool: Yahoo Web Analytics (former IndexTools): also JavaScript-based Web page statistics
collector; cannot collect Flash API calls

Open source tool: Piwik: a JavaScript-based Web page statistics collector, which also has
functionality to track goals such as the clicking on links to videos; can also track Flash API calls of
JWplayer using the Madlytics plugin.

Commercial Web analytics: Urchin: it’s basically the self-installable version of Google Analytics;
like Google Analytics, it provides video statistics through collecting stats on file downloads, but
can also be used to track events in a Flash video player, e.g. pause, play, link
16
http://www.longtailvideo.com/addons/plugins/107/Google-Analytics-Pro
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
Commercial Web analytics: Omniture: provides video statistics support through their
SiteCatalyst product

Commercial Web analytics: Webtrends: provides video statistics support through their
Webtrends product

Commercial Video analytics: TubeMogul: focused on social video hosting site uploads and
tracking, but also has on-site metrics

Commercial Video analytics: VisibleMeasures: focused on measurement of internet video
campaigns

Commercial Video analytics: Vquence VQmetrics: Australian video analytics company with a
focus on cross-site statistics for social video hosting sites
VIDEO SOLUTIONS
INTRO
As discussed above in the models section, the main types of video solutions related to putting video
on the Web are:

Video publishing platforms

Centralised Video aggregation platforms

Video publicity platforms

Video archiving platforms
VIDEO AGGREGATION PLATFORMS
In the models section, we determined that a centralised video aggregation platform will likely have
to be built. Not many commercial solutions are available and no open source solutions could be
found:

Xigla Software “Absolute Video Channel .NET”: US$349 (special $229 Nov 2009) – this is
software to buy and install.
This product provides the interface of an aggregation solution, but doesn’t provide for captions
or for discovery on the backend. All the links to videos need to be entered manually. This is a
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huge drawback, since it also will not automatically update new videos published e.g. to YouTube
channels or on agency websites.

Magnify.net: a hosted solution to creating aggregation channels with a free and a enterprise
solution.
The standard Magnify.net system seems to have many ways of automatically finding video and
grouping them differently, but it seems to be less concerned about managing additional
information for each video, such as metadata and captions.
We recommend using Xigla’s Absolute Video Channel as a pilot system to experience the capabilities
of a video aggregation feature, but we believe it is necessary to develop a custom solution to make
sure all the required features are available and ultimately minimize ongoing administrative
overhead.
VIDEO PUBLICITY PLATFORMS
We also determined that the main video publicity platform is YouTube and that publishing videos to
YouTube should be part of a larger social media strategy for the government. This does not imply
that YouTube is necessarily the best solution also as a generic government video publication
platform – this is something we want to analyse in this section.
VIDEO ARCHIVING PLATFORMS
Finally, video archiving is another challenge for a video solution. This should either be taken care of
by the National Archives in the same manner that website archiving and archiving of other
Government artefacts is being taken care of. A good video publishing platform will, however, also
retain the original source file of every uploaded video, retain metadata about the objects, and thus
fulfil some archiving needs, or at minimum prepare the content well for archiving. In this section we
will not further look into video archiving solutions.
VIDEO PUBLISHING PLATFORMS
What, therefore, remains, is an in-depth look at existing video publishing platforms, their features
and appropriateness for Government. While this section will list examples of the different types of
platforms available and even analyse some of their features for fulfilling the requirements as listed
above, this effort is not complete. It is recommended that an in-depth analysis of the existing
products and solutions in this space is undertaken before a choice is made to choose an open
source, a proprietary, a hosted solution, or even build one from scratch.
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VIDEO CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
BUY
A small number of commercial video content management systems exists. Mostly, software
solutions in this space are now offered as software as a service, which also take care of the server
infrastructure and bandwidth use. By installing a system, the system administration side of things
still has to be taken care of. At the same time, there is more control over the system and a larger
choice of using other solutions, for example for gathering statistics and hooking into other existing
government systems.

Ensemble Video: US, includes caption support, not the prettiest players,

WorldNow ProducerTM of WorldNow: a browser-based Site Management System to manage
and distribute media content on the Web; mainly used by media companies

Chuckwalla's: digital asset management (DAM) technology, no obvious subtitle support

PHPmelody: US, video CMS product, no obvious caption support, $49 (without logo)
Apart from these actual video content management systems, many commercial CMSs now also
provide video support. Here are three example commercial CMSs typically in use by government
agencies:

Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server: MOSS is more than a CMS, also having document
management, archiving, versioning, and workflow functionality. To include video into a Web
page, you can cut and paste HTML embed code into a “Web Part”. A video player must be
installed then, too – probably Flowplayer or JWPlayer. Silverlight can be integrated with MOSS,
too, but it is rather complicated. Neither provide for video search or browsing.

Lotus Web Content Management: HTML embed code pasting is possible. There is also the Video
Upshot product from Genus, which enables commercial CMSs, in particular IBM Lotus Web
Content Management IBM Content Manager, with further video support (upload, transcode,
metadata, streaming server), but has no obvious caption support.

Vignette 's Web Experience Platform: there is a Vignette Video Service that can be purchased on
top of the Platform, which provides full video support, supports captions.
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OPEN SOURCE
A few open source video management systems have been developed:

Fez : developed by the University of Queensland’s library as a archiving and publishing platform
for their digital documents on top of the FEDORA repository platform, it also includes support
for video. Fez supports Adobe FLV for embedding. Fez is published under the GNU GPL license.
Fez is a Web platform and provides the key functionalities such as search, browse, provide
metadata, upload, transcode, embed, etc. However, Fez is mainly built as a front end to an
archiving system and thus doesn’t include statistics or caption support.

VideoPress: developed by AUTOMATTIC as an open source video publishing platform similar to
the popular Web CMS WordPress. VideoPress supports video in MPEG-4 and Ogg format.
Like WordPress, VideoPress can be installed by anyone to create a video hosting solution and is
published under the GNU GPL. It doesn’t support captions yet.

Kaltura Community Edition (CE): developed by Kaltura as an open source video and rich media
platform including video management, searching, uploading, importing, editing, annotating,
remixing and sharing functionalities.
Kaltura CE can be installed by anyone to create a video hosting solution. It is published under the
GNU Affero General Public License v3. Captions, subtitles and other contextual overlays are
provided through PLYmedia. Kaltura CE is the only solution that also includes video editing
software.
Kaltura has extensions for Drupal, WordPress, MediaWiki, PHP and Ruby on Rails.

PHP Motion: PHPmotion is a free video sharing software that also has support for other types of
media such as audio/mp3. It uses the free tools such as JWplayer, FFMpeg, flvtool2, mencoder
to provide a full video CMS. It claims it is open source software, but it doesn’t provide a license
and to remove the branding, payment of US$100 is necessary. There is no subtitle support at
this stage.

Almost every open source CMS now has some video extensions, which can either embed video
from another site or directly host video inside the CMS. For example:
 Drupal video modules, e.g. http://drupal.org/project/video
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 Joomla video modules, e.g. http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/multimedia/videoplayers-a-gallery/1628
 WordPress video modules, e.g. http://www.easywordpressvideo.com/
 Plone video modules, e.g. http://plone.org/products/plumi
 MySourceMatrix has an embed movie tool
BUILD
As can be seen in the previous section, most existing Web CMSs will support video only through
embedding, rather than providing full video support, including upload, transcoding, video server,
video player, captions etc. They will work with any Video CMS though and we may consider building
such a CMS.
To build a video content management system from scratch requires development of all the above
listed functionalities.
Given modern Web development frameworks available in all major Web development language
(Java, Python, PHP, Ruby on Rails), it is actually not a huge challenge to develop the Web interface
for a video CMS. Further, video server software, transcoding software, and video player software is
now available as open source and can be used as part of a build from scratch. Finally, video metrics
can be provided either through hooking up the video player with traditional Web analytics tools, or
through special providers. See earlier sections for more details on these. Further functionality such
as accessibility, socialisation, and authentication integration would be necessary, too.
A rough estimate for the minimum development cost for a video solution is calculated here:
Encoding / Transcoding Software
Open Source Software
(FFMpeg)
$0
Server Software
Open Source Software
$0
Player Software
Open Source with commercial
license fee (JWplayer)
$500
Video statistics Software
Free or Open Source Software
(Google or Piwik)
$0
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Management and Publishing
Platform Basis
Open Source Software
(Kaltura CE)
$0
SW Enhancements
Custom Development
$100K - $500K est.
Infrastructure Architecture
Consulting
$100K - $300K est.
Sum
$200K - $800K est.
HOSTED VIDEO SERVICES (SAAS)
COMMERCIAL SAAS PROVIDERS
Many of the commercial hosted video services (white label video platform) do not announce pricing
on their websites. However, there are price and feature comparisons available17,18,19,20. Basically,
services are available for anything from about $10 to $2000 a month.

Ooyala: US, Director package (includes detailed metrics and multiple users) - The entry level is
$500/month with 2,500 hours of delivery included (they charge by hour, not GB, which is really
nice if you do a lot of HD). The “director” level is $1,500/month, with 15¢/hour for delivery. The
director level includes full API access, as well as dynamic bitrate streaming and more advanced
analytics. The “studio” level is $6,000/month and is 10¢/hour for delivery. It includes an
interactive video editor for advanced video interaction.

Brightcove: US, Professional package (includes custom metadata, custom CMS integration) - The
entry level is $6,000/year, 1 TB/month transfer, and 120,000 streams/month. “Pro” level is
$24,000/year (and $6,000 setup) with 2.4 million streams/month.
17
http://www.mig69.com/docs/comparison_sheet.pdf
18
http://go.ooyala.com/rs/OOYALA/images/ForresterWave.pdf
19
http://cmorrell.com/web-development/video-platform-roundup-follow-up-128
20
http://www.masternewmedia.org/professional-white-label-video-publishing-platforms-guide/
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
Viocorp: Australian, no integrated video CMS, but provides the necessary hosting, distribution,
and reporting functionality, as well as many special production needs; player is a bit crude and
subtitling functionality is provided separately

BitsOnTheRun: European, the guys behind JWplayer, very promising, subtitle support in the
video player, but not in the video management platform

Delve Networks: US, does speech recognition for improved SEO with direct access to time
offsets, provides captions through PLYmedia

Fliqz : US, video hosting solution, $99 - $999 per month

Twistage: US, open API. integration with Flowplayer and JWplayer

Vzaar: US, open API, $15 - $300 per month, http://vzaar.com/pricing

MulticastMedia: US, focus on live streaming, acquired Veotag, works with Akamai, pricing not
published

The FeedRoom 4.0 Enterprise Video Platform (EVP): US, players support captions – unsure about
the platform, pricing not published, part of Kit Digital

The Platform: US, mostly resell through CDNs e.g. EdgeCast, no subtitle support in the system –
player can be adapted to provide subtitle support
There are many other commercial services, but this list has filtered out those services that do not
meet minimum requirements, such as subtitle support.

VMIX: US, no obvious subtitle support

Castfire: US, no obvious subtitle support

Mig69: European, no obvious subtitle support

Episodic: US, focus on live events, no obvious subtitle support

Backlight: US, focus on agencies, no obvious subtitle support

Sorenson 360: US, no obvious subtitle support, short videos only, $99 - $999 per month
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PROVIDED THROUGH CDN
Adobe provides a list of CDNs that integrate with the Flash Video Streaming Service21 - companies
involved are:

Akamai

Level 3 Communications

Limelight Networks

CD Networks

EdgeCast

HighWinds

Internap

StreamingMedia Hosting

Velocix, part of Alcatel/Lucent
These generally do not provide an integrated media hosting solution, but rather satisfy only the
hosting, serving and distribution needs. These can be used in conjunction with a built solution.
In December 2009, Amazon released CloudFront Streaming, which also satisfies the hosting, serving
and distribution need. Pricing starts at US$0.170/GB per month for the first 10 TB served and
reduces linearly the more video is served. Uploads cost US$0.010 per 10,000 uploads, plus storage
costs of US$0.15/GB per month for the first 50 TB.
FREE
A comparison of free online video services can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_services .
These are the main ones, where only YouTube and Dailymotion satisfy subtitle requirements:

21
YouTube: US, YouTube’s service has many advantages, in particular a very advanced subtitling
functionality, but the videos are restricted to 10min duration, 1GB size, and the videos will
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashmediaserver/fvss/
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2009 Whole of Government Video Service
always have a YouTube logo on them – even in chromeless players, which are a possibility to
create a nice styled player than the default one

Dailymotion: France, Dailymotion is a service that provides both, HTML5 Ogg hosting and Adobe
Flash hosting. Their upload limit is 2GB (roughly 20min long files). Dailymotion provides HD video
hosting and caption support.

Vimeo: US, high-quality video, nice player, for US$10 a month: 5GB/week upload, priority
uploading, HD video. Video doesn’t support subtitles and has only basic analytics.

Viddler: US/Polish, $100 - $1,500 per month to get high volume channels, analytics and a
branded player. Viddler does not support subtitles.

Blip.tv: US, statistics for authors, focus on independent shows and monetisation, doesn’t
support subtitles.

VEOH: UK/US, has a focus on TV and movie content, but doesn’t support subtitles.

Metacafe: US, has a focus on short-form original content and general Web search, doesn’t
support subtitles.

TinyVid: NZ, hosts HTML5 video, no statistics, no support for subtitles yet.

DotSub: US, this is a particularly interesting free video publishing platform, because its focus is
on enabling the crowd sourcing of subtitles, which are then automatically propagated into the
embedded video player in use within a Web CMS. Their upload limit is 650MB (roughly 10min
long files). There are basic statistics, but no comments, ratings, or favouriting. It is a very useful
tool when considering crowd sourcing of captions and subtitles.
BUILD WITH OPEN SOURCE
The above listed systems Fez, VideoPress and Kaltura CE can provide the basis for setup of a
centralised video hosting solution that offers services to agencies. It would be necessary to extend
these and include further functionalities such as authentication and accessibility features.
BUILD FROM SCRATCH
The first part in building a central government video service for agencies is to create the software.
This was described above at the end of the previous section.
To provide the service requires the creation of an architecture that is robust and scalable and will
support the storage, CPU, and bandwidth needs of the agencies.
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A rough estimate for the monthly expenditure in actually running such a Government video solution
from Australia is given in the next table:
Storage
Per agency
$76 - $257 /month
Transcoding
1 server
$200 - $2,000 / month
Application Serving
1 server
$200 - $2,000 / month
Bandwidth
83GB – 11TB/month per agency
$165 - $15,000 / month
Sum
Fixed cost
$400 - $4,000/month
Per agency variable cost
$240 - $15,257 / month
Note how the Australian bandwidth cost dominates all other cost for large content collections. If
instead of hosting in Australia, it was possible to host out of the U.S., per agency variable cost would
drop to $100 - $4,000 per month.
At early stages of the service, the top example of the UCA agency will be very unlikely, even for
agencies that publish a lot of video content and get a lot of publicity. In the event of a very popular
video, one could always decide to simply move it to YouTube and avoid the massive bandwidth hit.
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10. RECOMMENDATION
INTRODUCTION
Building the best system architecture for a government video solution depends on what the existing
infrastructure looks like and what possibilities exist to extend it and integrate with it. Input from
existing Web managers across the APS should be acquired in order to understand the technical
possibilities and any potential special needs before deciding on the best possible architecture.
This report makes a recommendation that assumes that a diversity of content management systems
exists in and between agencies, and that the National Archives have a solution for archiving Web
content, including video content.
It further assumes that agencies are asking for help in solving video publication issues, that citizens
cannot locate Government video content easily, and that video publicity should be solved as part of
a general online engagement strategy for Government.
The recommendation is based on a strategic vision integrating video into the publicity activities of
the Government.
ARCHITECTURE RECOMMENDATION
After consideration of all of the input we have received from diverse agencies, from analysing best
practices, and existing technology solutions, we have created a strategic vision for an integrated
government video solution.
We recommend creation of a video system for government that consists of a modern, cooperating
and integrated set of solutions for agencies, for government communicators, for government
administration, for citizens, and more broadly for the online community. A single video software
system is incapable of satisfying all needs of these diverse groups of people.
We recommend the following solutions:
ALL-OF-GOVERNMENT VIDEO CMS
The heart of the system that we recommend consists of a central government video content
management and publication system. Think of it as a “YouTube for Government” – we could call it
“GovTube”. It is a service provided by a central government agency to the agencies and relieves the
agencies of having to worry about setting up a reliable and scalable infrastructure for publishing
videos. It will further provide a consistent handling of video content across all of government.
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Whole of Government Video Service 2009
The software to be chosen here must fulfil the needs of a video publishing platform as discussed
above, including upload, transcoding, publishing, embedding, accessibility, metrics, and API features.
We recommend not using a social video platform for this, but rather either (1) license software, (2)
use a sophisticated SaaS service, or (3) customise an existing open source solution. A checklist of
required features for such a software should be created and used in a tender to judge potential
solutions.
AGENCY WEB CMS INTEGRATION
Agencies’ Web CMSs will require interacting with the all-of-government video CMS. It is possible to
create an integration in such a way that agency users will not need to learn using a new system, but
can access the core functionality of the video CMS transparently through their existing CMS. This
will solve the video publishing needs for agencies.
This requires development of some glue code in the form of code extensions or plugins for the
existing Web CMS. These plugins can automatically log into the central video CMS as the correct user
and then interact with the API of the video CMS to provide seamless video upload, publishing and
embedding functionality. The development effort required to hand down these functionalities
should be minimal and can be shared across agencies where the same systems are used. It is also
possible that vendors already provide such code for typical open source CMSs.
YOUTUBE CROSS-PUBLISHING
YouTube is the best means to gain exposure and search engine optimization for videos. For
publicity reasons, we recommend that each agency (or portfolio) receives their own YouTube
channel as a partner to an existing agency (or portfolio) website, branded in the same style. There
should be a publication guide for which videos make sense to publish through to YouTube, including
the need to keep such videos under 10min.
As a central video CMS is being rolled out, publishing through to YouTube can be integrated and
made available seamlessly.
The agency-specific YouTube channels should be complemented with an all-of-government YouTube
channel similar to http://www.youtube.com/usgovernment. This special channel will have links
through to all the other agency/portfolio channels and provide a central access means for Australian
Government video content on YouTube.
The use of other social video networks such as Facebook, Dailymotion, Break.com, Vimeo should be
sparse and part of a larger social engagement strategy/activity.
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Some of the publicity for video published to YouTube and to “GovTube” should be automated, such
as RSS type XML feeds, an announcement to Twitter, Facebook pages, del.icio.us, etc. A strategy
should be worked out and set up.
AGGREGATION/SYNDICATION/SEARCH
To make government video searchable and discoverable from a central location, we further
recommend extending http://www.australia.gov.au/ with video search and browsing functionality. It
can also be accessed directly from http://video.gov.au/.
This accesses a central government video aggregation platform, which discovers video on all
government publication platforms, including websites and YouTube channels, and makes them
available to the public in a consistent manner. Further, it provides another source of audience to the
agencies as video links back to the publishing pages on the agency websites.
We recommend that this should be built as a separate browsing service where all video is organised
by categories or tag cloud, as well as searchable. The aggregation software should to be written from
scratch and should export mediaRSS feeds in diverse groupings. The search functionality could be
provided through the existing Government search provider.
This video service should be made a part of http://australia.gov.au by introducing a “videos” tab
similar to the existing “directories” tab, which includes both, search and browsing functionality for
videos.
WORKFLOW & ARCHIVING
Governments have more requirements and processes to fulfil than typical commercial entities. For
example, the acquisitions of source material into archives or the need to manage the approval
process for publishing are not typical functionalities of a video CMS. It may be necessary to develop
a custom workflow for these extra needs.
The workflow would initially be manual – e.g. “send your CDs, tapes or DVD to the National Archive
together with a reference into the video CMS for metadata”, or “you must have approval from your
manager on this form before publishing the video”.
The full workflow could eventually be automated with an online system, upload of high-quality
source material, and an email-based approval system. There will likely be more steps in such a
workflow and it may even be possible that most of this can be handled by the central video CMS.
The need for a workflow system will have to be monitored and a system potentially be implemented
at a later stage.
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Here is an overview diagram of the main components in the video solution vision:
Note the separation between what is a Government agency activity and a central Government
activity. Also note how Google only crawls what is directly exposed to the Internet and not the white
label government video platform, even though that one provides APIs to interact with other Content
Management Systems and with the syndication site at australia.gov.au.
ESTIMATED INVESTMENT REQUIRED

“GovTube”: white label video hosting service for agencies, centrally provided – proposed to be
custom developed on the back of an existing open source solution to allow for custom
extensions, such as custom workflow, custom access control, hosting of interactive e-learning
content, potential HTML5 support – costing is difficult to do without more in-depth specification,
but is estimated to be between $200K - $800K development cost, $400 - $4,000 monthly fixed
cost, and $240 - $15K monthly variable cost per agency.

Web CMS integration: custom developed either in-house or through contractor – maybe $15K$30K per Web CMS – includes video search and embedding; no extra cost required for hosting
and delivery.
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
YouTube channels: branded YouTube channels for Government have just become free for all
government departments (http://governingpeople.com/Home/18878) – this offer should be
taken advantage of; no extra cost required for hosting and delivery.

Video publicity: some setup effort is required to optimise automated publicity either in-house or
through contractor – maybe $5K - $10K; minimal monthly cost for hosting this service less than
$100/month.

Video aggregation & citizen access: custom developed mashup-style system either in-house or
through contractor – maybe $20K-$30K – includes video host pages with all information about
videos and links to agencies; small monthly cost for hosting this service less than $500/month.

Video search: extension of Web search on australia.gov.au to videos – extra service to be
negotiated with vendor (Funnelback is currently powering search on australia.gov.au).
“GovTube”
Development Cost
$200K - $800K
Monthly Fixed Cost
$400 - $4K
Monthly Per Agency Cost
$240 - $15K
Web CMS Integration
Per Agency Development Cost
$15K - $30K
YouTube Channels
Per Agency & Whole-of-Gov
$0
Video Publicity Processes
Development / Setup Cost
$5K - $10K
Monthly Fixed Cost
$100
Development Cost
$20K - $30K
Monthly Fixed Cost
$500
Development Cost & Monthly
Fixed Cost
Vendor request
Video Aggregation Site
Video Search Extension to
Australia.gov.au
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OVERALL THE COST MAY BE:
Development Cost for the central site: $225,000 - $840,000
Development Cost per agency:
$240 - $15,000
Monthly Fixed Cost:
$1,000 - $5,000
Monthly Cost per Agency:
$240 - $15,000
This cost is just for setting up the technology and infrastructure. To make a fully workable
government video solution, one has to also consider other requirements such as training needs,
support services and production assistance.
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11. CONCLUDING REMARKS
Video is the most powerful communications tool. As the visual literacy of the people rises, video will
become even more powerful. A massive rise in online/mobile/ITV video is inevitable.
As the commercial world drives this, governments will need to respond. The use of video will soon
define the difference between a modern web presence and one that is lagging behind on the
innovation curve. Indeed, it is probably already the case for many people.
We believe that the Australian people now expect government agencies to invest in their
web/mobile channels and judging on their online habits, video is a key requirement.
As our report reveals, contrary to what might be thought, online video can be made accessible for
people with vision impairment. A concerted effort to communicate core information and services
using video will substantially increase awareness in the visually-impaired community.
Importantly, video could substantially improve awareness of government activities amongst the
many people with some level of cognitive disability. As one example, it may be possible that some
people might not consider going into business due to some inability to understand the ‘red tape’
across the levels of government. The BNRP video presentation we presented in our report could
support these people.
As highlighted by our DHS change-management example, video will help organisations cope better
with substantial changes to the way they work. Many complaints about government stem from staff
not being fully versed in new service delivery paradigms. Video can drive awareness better than any
other communications approach.
As has been identified in other government thinking, government also has a role to play in
stimulating innovation in the online space. This is important in the context of the National
Broadband Network (NBN). Government can demonstrate advanced use of video online and the
opportunities that this extra bandwidth can be used for.
We present our recommendations on the basis that their implementation is a strong and powerful
answer to the question that rightly is being asked by the Australian people. Only through actual
demonstration can we be sure that the underlying reasons for the NBN can be explained.
This report should be considered a major step forward and a basis for more consideration and work.
It is the beginning of what will be a long and complex road. In the spirit of the web, we should get to
work, develop rapidly, experiment, and not be afraid to fail.
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