Video for
Politicians and
Government
Dr Silvia Pfeiffer
Vquence Pty Ltd
For NSW Public Sphere #1

1.
Politicians, Elections,
Transparency
and Video

US politicians on YouTube

The Obama Election (1)
 80 staffers on new media
 raised $500M of $750M online
 most donations under $100
 $8M spent online - pales in
comparison to TV spending
 large youth turn-out

The Obama Election (2)
 1819 videos, 100M views
vs. 332 videos, 25M views McCain
 max views: 7,931,385 (Dance on The
Ellen Degeneres Show)
 large diversity of videos
 35% of population watched
online videos

Daily Video views
according to TubeMogul

YouTube contributed to Obama’s
victory through clever, youth-oriented,
personal, and meaningful videos,
which energized a large grass-roots
movement and turned indifferent
citizens into engaged citizens that
cared to vote.

Austr. Politicians on YouTube
 204 politicians in House and
Senate
 only 31 have a YouTube channel
= 15%
 max channel views:
 16,134 (Kevin Rudd) eq. 230K US views
 11,063 (Bob Brown)
 max video views:
 32,713 (Kevin Rudd - Website intro)
 10,461 (Christine Milne - Ice melt)

Senator Kate Lundy
Blog central site
Videos support
other efforts
Videos on
YouTube (13)
& Vimeo (39)
45% increase
time spent on
site

NSW Politicians on YouTube
 Legislative assembly:
7 out of 93 (8%)
 Legislative council:
3 out of 42 (7%)
 41% of NSW population is
on broadband = 2.87M potential

Open Source/Stds Video
 Metavid:
Video archive of
the US
Congress
 HTML5 <video>
 Ogg Theora
 Annodex

2.
Government,
Transparency
and Video

US government
on YouTube

FEMA: Fed. Emergency Mgmt
Agency
Aim: reduce
the loss of
life and
property
and protect
the Nation
163 on site,
190 on YT

US Department of State
1532 videos on state.gov
130 on YouTube

NASA
326 videos
on YT
333 on
nasa.gov
Part of
Site

Austr. Gov. YT channels
 AusGovDBCDE (18)
 DeptEnvironment (19)
 NTGovernment (2)
 Cityofsydney (33)
 AirForceHQ (103)
 AustWarMemorial (16)
 AustFilmCommission (11)
 DefenceJobsAustralia (16)
 ChildSupportAgencyAu (10)
 NationalGalleryAus (6)

CSIRO & CSIRO publishing
39 videos 42 videos
http://www.csiro.au/ http://www.publish.csiro.au/
Vodcast random formats

AGIMO: Using YouTube
+ ease of use
+ cost effectiveness
+ established audience
+ embedding
+ captions

Agimo: YouTube Risks
- Terms of Use: potential unreliability
- Terms of Use: reproduction license
- Outages and maintenance schedules
- branding & click-through on each video
- Implied endorsement of 3rd party
- Unfair competitive advantage

NSW video vault trial
 central video repository
 online publication
 “YouTube for government”
 open source system
 service provided by
government for government

What determines success?
 Clear goals
 Honesty
 Focus on people
 Continuous experimentation
 Continuous measurement
 Top-level commitment