Feds feed the Web
GCN Insider | Several agencies have embraced the power of Web videos
Sure, YouTube is where you turn to see the latest viral video making its way around the Net. There's the dancing military cadet, the Diet Coke-Mentos experiments, 'Family Guy' clips and ' in our more highbrow moments ' entire episodes of 'Masterpiece Theater.'
But Web videos aren't just entertainment. Several government agencies have decided to embrace the power of Web videos by putting educational videos on FeedRoom.com. Company officials described the FeedRoom as a site that 'provides end-to-end video services for its corporate and federal agency clients, creating both the environment and distribution channels for their video content.' Unlike YouTube, the FeedRoom 'provides its customers with the ability to control and measure the audiences viewing their content.' The site digitizes any type of file, whether it arrives via satellite, DVD, tape, File Transfer Protocol or upload, company officials said.
The General Services Administration, Health and Human Services Department, Pentagon and State Department have all posted instructional or informative videos on FeedRoom.com.
The Navy, for example, posted a 30-minute video called 'Sentinels of the Sea' about its marine mammal program. It turns out that for all the fancy technology available, dolphins and their sonar talents are still the fastest means of finding suspicious man-made objects in the sea, such as mines.
Freedom isn't free, but the FeedRoom is. Check out the Pentagon's videos at pentagontv. feedroom.com/.
About the Author
Trudy Walsh is a senior writer for GCN.