Dr. DigiPol

For all the hype about YouTube, it is not the ideal place to distribute political and advocacy video. Sure, it reaches millions of viewers, and that is a good thing. But YouTube is not a destination site for people interested in politics and policy issues. When a political video pops on YouTube it is a phenomenon to be reckoned with, but that pop is never guaranteed.

That is why the emergence of political and issue oriented video websites is so exciting. These sites offer a more compelling and relevant context for people wanting to see video about candidates and issues. And in the end, as Eric Alterman of KickApps.com explains, it is all about context.

While YouTube may be about promoting YouTube as it allows individuals to promote themselves (such as OK Go and their famous Here We Go treadmill video), as suggested by its policy of reserving rights to repurpose any video on it for their own marketing needs, new sites like the Capitol Hill Broadcasting Network are focused on providing YouTube-like ease and access for a strictly political and policy issue audience.

Founded by David Livingston, a member of the Livingston Group—a lobbying firm headed by former Republican Congressman Bob Livingston—CHBN was created to provide an omni-partisan platform for uploading and sharing political videos. Whether you are a candidate, advocacy group, government agency, corporation, or political strategist, CHBN is available for you to upload your videos. Once uploaded, people can either find your video by searching on the CHBN website, or you can embed a video viewer on your own website to stream the video in your own specific context. And the service is free.

The future of political and advocacy video is wide open and we will be seeing more examples in the coming year. You can already find other pilot online video projects, such as a new human rights video hub being developed by WITNESS and piloted on Global Voices Online . This project is all about using user-generated video of human rights abuses to mobilize global activism.

With the ubiquity of mobile phones capable of recording video, the potential for these video websites to explode onto the political and advocacy scene is enormous. So keep an eye out for these new ways to use online video for political and advocacy campaigns. And keep your cameras rolling.

Cross posted on Moving Targets.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 13th, 2006 at 12:16 pm and is filed under Digital Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.