Obama to Put Weekly Address on YouTube
There’s no question that between viral hits such as “Yes We Can” and his dramatic speech on race, YouTube helped President-elect Barack Obama win this election. But just because the campaign’s over doesn’t mean Obama is ditching his online video success.
Obama delivered the weekly national Democratic address via YouTube this week, marking the first time the address has been released as web video. According to Change.gov, Obama will deliver these weekly web video updates (they’re also on the radio) throughout the transition and will continue once he is president.
As of this morning, the video has been watched more than half a million times.
Election-Themed Videos That Are Too Late to the Game
Tomorrow, no matter who wins the presidential election, there’s one group that will definitely be in a sad state — the intrepid content creators that have been putting out politically themed videos this week. So take a moment to mourn the online video filmmaker who produced a hilarious video while fighting off his Halloween hangover, because no matter how brilliant the concept, there’s an expiration date on America’s attention. Wednesday morning, we’ll wake up with a new America, and all of these videos will feel like old news.
But the fact that these videos are getting in just under the wire doesn’t mean they aren’t funny. Take, for example, Lando Calrissian for President, which is a hilarious mesh of Star Wars and American politics.
Watch McCain on Saturday Night Live
Hey, that John McCain can be funny! And (shocker) Tina Fey came back for another show. The QVC bit was pretty good. If you missed this weekend’s Saturday Night Live, NBC showed that it knows how to milk a potential viral video with the best of ‘em. It had the clip up before the west coast broadcast.
And just like Palin before him, McCain even did a spot on “Weekend Update.”
More Celebs, CEOs Want You to Vote
Oh wait. Zach Braff wants me to vote. Let me rescue my mail-in ballot from the recycle bin then.
Sigh. The one good thing about this election almost being over is that I won’t have to sit through any more insufferable celeb-studded videos reminding me of my civic duty.
This latest one is directed by Steven Spielberg and features Tom Cruise, Will Smith and Leonardo DiCaprio. As if actors from your own country weren’t blowhardy enough, it also features Canadian Ryan Reynolds, Englishman Orlando Bloom and Kazahkstan’s famous fake reporter Borat.
Not to be outdone, a number of CEOs have formed their own voting supergroup video. Eric Schmidt, Donald Trump and John Chambers are among the bosses announcing that they are giving their employees one hour to vote. One hour? Obviously these CEOs have never ridden MUNI. Read more of this story
Study: Online Vid Viewers Engaged in Election
Next week at this time we’ll have a new President-elect. And though the outcome might get mired in a legal morass, one clear winner from the year-and-a-half campaign has been online video. Now, a new study from Compete and Cisco sheds a little more light on exactly how U.S. voters were using online video and how online video affected how people followed the election.
According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index Pulse Survey: Online Video and Political Engagement Highlights, which surveyed more than 1,800 U.S. registered voters, oldteevee is still king for finding news and information on the presidential election. But 30 percent said they used online video to follow election coverage. Seventy-five percent of these respondents believed watching video online let them follow the election more closely.
Republicans and Democrats aren’t just split on the issues, they go about finding online video in different ways. Democrats use traditional news sites and social networking sites to discover video, while Republicans generally rely on search engines to find video. However, both parties were almost equal in their use of YouTube.
Online video viewers are also more engaged in this campaign season than non-online video watchers, as 62 percent of online video watchers say they followed the election “very closely” as opposed to 37 percent of non-online video watchers. Additionally, 68 percent of online video users followed both party’s national conventions compared to 47 percent of non-online video watchers. Read more of this story
McCain Campaign Wants Special Exception From DMCA Takedowns on YouTube
The McCain campaign, frustrated that its official videos have repeatedly been taken down by YouTube due to copyright claims by media companies, yesterday asked the site to reconsider its copyright policies. Specifically it asked YouTube to “commit to a full legal review” upon receipt of takedown notices pertaining to videos posted by political candidates and campaigns.
Both the McCain and the Obama campaign have had their videos removed by YouTube after news organizations complained via takedown notice that their broadcasters’ images and words are being used for political purposes. However, the McCain campaign is saying such videos fall under fair use, and contending that YouTube is complying too readily with undeserved takedown notices.
McCain-Palin Supporters Gone Wild
Video interviews by confrontational Barack Obama supporters at John McCain rallies are shooting up the YouTube charts, revealing angry and nasty anti-Obama sentiment that is in turn motivational for the Democratic presidential contender’s supporters. You almost feel like Joe Francis is behind the camera asking girls to flash him. And watching brings the same voyeuristic and embarrassed emotional response.
A video titled The McCain-Palin Mob is the No. 3 most-discussed video on YouTube today, with more than 675,000 views since it was posted Wednesday. In the clip, Ohio rally-goers tell blogger Tim Russo (who’s behind the camera) they have reason to believe Obama is a terrorist. Russo’s questioning is clearly aimed at putting his subjects on the defensive, but they take it to another level, in particular one woman who keeps pushing her way back on camera. Viewership of the video is partisan as well, but on the other side of the spectrum, with more than 130,000 views coming from the Huffington Post and many more from other liberal blogs.
Another, separate video from a Pennsylvania rally has McCain supporters calling Obama a “commie faggot” among other epithets, and is the No. 25 most-discussed YouTube clip today.
In a campaign where off-hand remarks by candidates regularly become leading nightly news items, citizens with video cameras wield a lot of journalistic power. And so it’s a bit hard to take Russo’s point of view, in that his disdain for his subjects is so clear (see some unprintable, for us, comments he makes about them on his blog). But at the same time, the mocking response he evokes from the woman at the McCain rally, which would have never aired at length (or at all) on TV, made its way out into the world. We live in interesting times!
Vid-Biz:BitGravity, Debates, Playboy
BitGravity Adjusts Video Delivery Quality to Match Connection; CDN launched a new API today that lets content distributors automatically tweak the quality of video stream delivered, based on the quality of the user’s connection. (VentureBeat)
Candidates Urge Networks to Free Up Debate Footage; letters from Obama and McCain camps want video debates available for sharing, blogging and re-posting. (Broadcasting & Cable)
Spike.com Premieres Playmate Show & Tell; new online series offers guys dating tips like “What Not to Do on a Date” and “How to Cook a Romantic Meal.” (release)
Xbox Gets PBS Programming; gaming geeks will get full episodes of science programming like Wired Science and Scientific American Frontiers, as well as Ken Burns documentaries. (paidContent)
Jupiter: Bad Economy Will Hit Pay TV, Not Broadband; study finds one-third of people would cut back on movies, 12 percent would drop premium channels like HBO, but only 2 percent would cut off Internet service. (MediaPost)
SMPTE Forms Committee to Standardize Matering and Packaging Formats; Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers working on formats for content distributed over broadband, could enable delivery of content from any online source, and play it back on any device. (SMPTE)
Elecard Devices Gets $10 Million; Russian IPTV developer gets convertible loan from Slaviansky Bank. (Quintura Blog)
I.TV Brings OldTeeVee Listings to the iPhone; free app lists television content in your area, lets you write and share reviews on your phone and adds calendar listings for shows you want to watch. (jkOntheRun)
Obama Puts Keating Economics Short Online
Online video has played a big part in this presidential election, and candidate Barack Obama just upped the ante by releasing today a new short film through YouTube called KEATING ECONOMICS: John McCain & The Making of a Financial Crisis (it’s also available at keatingeconomics.com). The video is actually not very YouTube-friendly. It’s 13 minutes long. It’s about a financial scandal from a time that most YouTubers probably don’t remember. And it doesn’t star Tina Fey as Sarah Palin.
This isn’t the first time the Obama camp has put up a lengthy video online. Copies of his 37-minute “More Perfect Union” speech were posted on YouTube and pulled in more than 5 million plays. And his 50-minute Democratic nomination acceptance speech attracted nearly a million views on YouTube. It’s unlikely, however, that this video — which is being billed as a “documentary” about John McCain and the “Keating 5’s” role in the savings and loan scandal of the late 80s, and is narrated entirely by William Black, a federal banking regulator from 1984-94 — will enjoy the same degree of success.
Hollywood Encourages Voter Registration With… Sarcasm?
This political cycle has seen an incredibly innovative use of online video, but they can’t all be winners. The latest Get Out the Vote initiative is a viral video produced by Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company Appian Way and literally jam-packed with famous faces. But even though at least 10 Academy Awards have been won by those participating — well, most of them were won by Dustin Hoffman — the ad is still a major misfire.
What’s wrong here? Where do I start?
- Tonally, it’s incredibly smug. I mean, sarcasm from Hollywood celebrities? Really? That seemed like a good idea? REALLY? I mean, for five minutes? REALLY? (This sarcasm is intentional, for the record.)
Seth RoganJonah Hill and Sarah Silverman are the only ones who are actually funny.- Tobey Maguire looks like he’s moments away from crying.
- Benicio Del Toro looks like the War on Drugs is being waged inside his liver at that very second.
- The smugness quotient gets ramped up to a new plane of patronizing when we spend about thirty seconds being reminded that you have to register in order to vote. Leave us alone, Laura Linney! Leonardo DiCaprio just got done bugging us about this! God!
- Oh, by the way, Leonardo DiCaprio does not have a watch (or a cell phone). Because HE IS TOO IMPORTANT TO KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS.
- So if I send this to five of my friends, and they each send it to five of their friends, and then they send it to five of their friends… Oh, so THAT’S how viral video works? Thanks famous people!
- And then the video’s stunning conclusion: Dustin Hoffman hits on Julie the 2nd AD while the crew laughs. To be fair, Julie is wearing a halter top on a film set. But still.
I feel passionately that voting is an important thing to do — it gives the average citizen a voice, and serves as a helpful reminder that we are all complicit in our government’s actions. So, my humble suggestion: send this link to your unregistered American friends. Not this video.
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