Post in Senedd.tv

Apr 20 02:29 UTC

From:
http://marilwyd.blogspot.com/2008/04/i-want-my-i-want-my-seneddtv.html
Pictures on the blog post.

Thursday, April 17, 2008
I want my.. I want my Senedd.tv

I'm going to geek-out now, so please excuse me. Peter Black AM told me to email
the IT guys at the Senedd and get a password for senedd.tv. Well, when I say he
told ME, he mentioned it on his blog, so he told US. But anyhow...

I have an (un)healthy obsession with web services, I've sign up to every
web2.0/social/media service that has appeared since 1999. I have to, it's a
compulsion. So I had to try this out too.

The IT guy emaliled me a logon. I was expecting a sprawling attenpt at YouTube.
But it's actually really good.

First thing you notice is how.. small.. it is. Not in a bad way. It is perfect
for an Adobe Air application in the future. In this grab, you can see that you
have the option of watching streams from the Main Chamber, or the three
committee rooms. I'm posting this at 8:00am, so I guess they're still in bed at
the moment. So you hit the "schedule" menu option:

Two thing are apparent. First, you can't watch EVERY session in this beta.
Conspicuous by its absence: the E-Democracy launch itself! lol. Anyhow, hit the
watch-again links to ... watch again (high tech this, you keeping up?)

Here is the meat of the thing, the player. All the common controls. At the
bottom of the screen, you get the meeting agenda, and you can click on the
various items to forward to that point in the meeting (like dvd chapters).

You get four options for stream: Hi, which is roughly equivalent to a good
flash-movie or well-encoded youtube video. There is a fullscreen option.. the
quality isn't quite good enough for fullscreen, even at this high setting, so I
don't see the need for that. Then you get medium and low... which I wouldn't
bother with, frankly. Then mp3, which I wish they would rename "audio" or
"sound-only", because it's not like you can download it.

My advice to the senedd.tv guys:
lose the low stream setting, and rename the medium stream to low. Rename mp3 as
audio, or you will get pensioners emailing you saying your site is broken and
they can't download the mp3s.

What I would like to see on the site is an RSS feed for the schedule page.
Unless you are a compulsive media-watcher (*cough*) you're only going to want
to watch sessions that deal with issues you care about, so an RSS feed is an
ideal way of keeping people updated.

Today I'm going to test it to death, in Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Opera, Internet
Explorer, Safari, on Windows, OSX and Linux. Expect an even geeker report soon
;)
Posted by Al Iguana at 07:46
Labels: e-government, media, news, wag, web 2.0