Outloud.tv

First of two post about interesting European projects I found this week through correspondence over the DigitalBicycle project.

Found out about Outloud, a collaborative video collection from Jay Dedman. My Dutch comprehension is poor but from what I can translate, it's run by a Community Media Center (Network?) in Amsterdam named Salto . According to this page in English they are the:

World's largest local network, carrying 3 television and 6 radio channels.

And though I'm probably butchering their model, it looks like two of their stations:

A1: Local information, politics, neighbourhood news, culture, social themes
A2: Ethnic and cultural communities, youth, experimental art and religion

parallel PEG, Community Media and possibly Open Channels, and might be supported from by profits from the third station:

AT5: News, current events

Back to the Outloud project... They breakdown the "Outloud Flow" into 4 steps. I decided to post them below (including the Dutch subtext) since reading Dutch as an English speaker is so much fun....

1. MakeYourClip
Pak een (DV) camera en film je materiaal Lees je materiaal in op de computer en edit je clip (Bijvoorbleeld op een iMac met (gratis) iMovie van Apple) Encodeer je clip met de gratis codec van 3ivX die te downloaden is van hun website.

2. UploadYourClip
Ga naar de website van Outloud, kies voor onderdeel 'upload' Vul de gegevens van je clip in Upload je clip naar de outloud server Als het uploaden voltooid is krijg je te zien of alles goed is gegaan Je clip is nu beschikbaar voor uitzending.

3. RateClipOnline
Na het uploaden van je clip wordt deze automatisch omgezet naar flash video files Dit encoderen gebeurt met Flix, High Quality Flash Encoding Je clip kan nu online bekenen, beoordeeld en besproken worden Op basis van de score en datum van uploaden wordt er een playlist gemaakt Deze playlist bepaalt wanneer welke clip te zien is op Salto TV.

4. WatchClipOnTv
Outloud clips worden in verschillende blokken uitgezonden op SALTO TV Deze blokken komen de hele dag langs Een outloud-blok komt helemaal dynamisch tot stand, inclusief intro, leaders, bumpers en outro.

So, basically, you make and compress a short video (under 3 minutes) upload it to their server, rate videos online, and get to watch them on TV. Pretty close to what we hope to do with DigitalBicycle except we'll be relying on a distributed network, work with more long-form video's (though I do like the idea of under 3-minute videos, maybe we should have a special section for shorts, like a checkout line for 5 minutes or less...), and we'll be asking the community members themselves to be putting content from the community on their own local channels.

There's probably more to Outloud and Salto that I've already seen, I'll have to delve a little deeper and talk with my Dutch speaking father-in-law this evening.