UGC and local media
Apr 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Timur Yarnall
Set up user-generated content on your Web site to open up new revenue streams.
Figure 1. Workflow for working with user-generated content
Click to enlarge
With the explosion in user-generated content (UGC) over the past few years, it's hard to believe that YouTube is just four years old. Remember that hardly any coverage of Hurricane Katrina came in from user-generated video. The coverage consisted of cable and TV personalities and their crews. That has all changed with shocking speed in the past two years and, coupled with the economic recession that has punished traditional media, it's never been more critical for local broadcasters to have a strong UGC strategy and implementation that leads to new revenue streams. From a system architecture perspective, the workflow for working with UGC is not much different than working with station-generated content on your Web site. The overall workflow in Figure 1 tends to apply to both content processes.
How to set up UGC
The key baseline requirements in each area of the workflow are:
Capture
Rather than capturing video content from a station broadcast in one format, any UGC solution must be capable of ingesting content (or rather, having content uploaded to it by users) from a variety of devices (users' computers, mobile devices, handheld cameras) and in a variety of formats (MPEG, JPEG, QuickTime, Flash, WMV, etc.).
Review
While station-generated content typically doesn't need to be screened for pornography, copyright infringement or obscenity, it's vital that your UGC solution provide a mechanism for any uploaded content to be screened both prior to and after publishing. It's also important that station staff and the user community on your Web site can report and reject objectionable content. (There are some technology-based solutions that provide for a high degree of screening, but none are yet at the level where human review is not required.)
Edit
This consists of the ability to trim down any submissions to only the pertinent content. For the purposes of protecting against copyright infringement or payment of royalty fees, this must also include the ability to strip out any music associated with a video submission if it's not clear that the music was independently created. While YouTube may have millions of dollars to fight royalty lawsuits, my guess is that most who are reading this article do not.
Encode
Once content has been approved and has been edited, it should be encoded into your preferred streaming format. I strongly recommend Flash-based video streaming as it has by far the highest usage, though a minority of UGC solutions have adopted Microsoft's Silverlight. Note that some solutions may take the encoding step just after the capture/ingest stage. This is a perfectly valid setup, but leads to higher use of system resources and bandwidth.
Publish (generate revenue)
With the UGC encoded and ready to publish to your site, appropriate ads should be included with the content during the publishing process. Monetization of UGC is by no means a mature process, but generally the same advertising formats you'd use on your station Web site and on your mobile solution are appropriate here. These ad formats generally fall into three main categories: contextual ads (such as Google's AdSense), display/banner ads and in-stream video ads (such as preroll or overlay ads).
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