Reader-submitted video

Posted on February 3, 2007 by Melissa Worden

On the heels of YouTube, I think newspaper Web sites will experiment with user-submitted video more this year, and I see some great examples on/associated with newspaper Web sites such as Random This on KnoxNews.com and Bakotube by Bakotopia.com.

Readers have the equipment (plenty of cell phone cameras, camcorders, P&S cameras out there), and now they have easy access to editing software through sites such as Jumpcut.com and Eyespot.com, according to this Reuters story (I found via Lost Remote) on Yahoo!

If we let readers put these videos on our sites, we need to pay attention to these sites.

So I took a closer look at Jumpcut.com. It’s a Yahoo! product. A publishing company giving readers the tools to edit. Hm. Interesting idea … Making a video looks so easy to do. Get this, though: You can view a video, and in the lower-right corner, click on the “remix” button and then re-edit that very video.

And that’s the point. It’s not just an editing site. It’s a community sharing site.

Ohhh.

Eyespot.com does essentially the same thing. Here’s what they say in their “about” section:

“We want our users to be able to share everything. Under every public video here at eyespot, there is a save link. Click it, and add that video to your account. Now you can use that video in your mixes. Find the videos you like, and mash them together! Think up a theme for your Mix and use the search to find videos that fit the theme. Save them and Mix away.

If you use a video that was created by someone else in your mix, we think that’s great. We give the originator credit in the form of ‘attribution’ or text frames at the end of your mix giving them credit for their contribution to your work.”

(Yahoo!’s product may add a credit tag, but it doesn’t specifically say if they do or not in their “about” section.)

Even so, people are importing copyright material. I see an opportunity for even infringement, as Lucas Grindley talks about here. These companies better line up their lawyers, too.

By the way, I find this quote from that Reuters story particularly interesting (especially given the recent discussions on camera quality):

“A lot of the video is raw, edgy, badly lit and, considering the more than 100 million daily views, that’s just how the viewers want it. ‘It goes straight to the point, telling a story. And in a way that is more comic than dramatic,’ said Nicolas Charbonnier, a 24-year-old Danish video-blogger.”