Case Study 1:

James has been given a DVD of his minister’s recent address to a remote indigenous community. It is designed to accompany a traditional media release on the department’s website. User comments on the video are not sought, and the video is expected to have a high initial demand, trailing off quickly after the initial publication of the video. James also has a copy of the transcript of the announcement.

Approach:

James encodes the video into an appropriate, commonly-used format, ‘topping and tailing’ the video with his department’s branding. He then uploads the video file to his department’s website, ready for use by his department’s embedded media player. The video appears alongside the official media release and video transcript.

Before publishing, James confirms with his indigenous liaison advisors whether he needs to include notifications on the video’s introduction regarding sound or vision of deceased indigenous Australians.

James can’t initially measure the video’s direct usage, but is able to infer interest from his web analytics package measuring visits to, and time spent on, the media release ‘landing’ page.

When he has time, James revisits the video and timecodes the transcript to provide a sub-title/captioning track for the video.

James feels confident that he can reproduce this process for future video-based media releases. He updates his organisation’s publishing procedure guides accordingly and expands his agency’s current RSS feeds to accommodate multimedia files.

Case Study 2:

Approach:

Susan’s web team produces a detailed screencast of the sign-up procedure, complete with captioning, audio descriptions, narration, on-screen directions and sign language variants. The website targets users who may have a low level of literacy, or for whom English is a second language.

Several versions of the screencast are professionally produced, with alternative audio tracks (and possibly alternative video tracks) covering multiple languages. As the agency has a mature content management system and video platform, the video is automatically transcoded and branded with agency logos. All video and audio tracks (at several quality settings) are correctly linked in with the CMS and embedded video playback software. High-quality versions of the videos are archived offline.

The agency brand is prominently displayed on the video footer and in the ‘outro’ sequence. Susan’s web team decides to licence the screencast video with a Creative Commons-Attribution licence. Downloadable versions of the video are provided alongside the embedded player.

Shortly afterwards, the video appears on several third-party websites (YouTube, Vimeo, et. al.), and quickly becomes the number one video search result for “How to sign up for agency online services”. Accompanying text redirects viewers to the agency’s service website. Video usage and web analytics statistics indicate that the video is viewed over 1 million times in the 12 months since its launch.

Case study 3:

Approach:

Nathan heads up a communications team within his department. He has been asked to gauge feedback on a new proposal by his department via online channels. The department head assists in the creation of the video, and agrees to licence it in such a way as to encourage redistribution outside the .gov.au domain. Nathan arranges for the video to be uploaded to YouTube, and then embeds the video on his department’s consultation page. Nathan updates his site’s privacy policy to ensure that visitors are informed that their usage details are shared with third-party providers when viewing the YouTube embedded video.

Once uploaded, Nathan uses YouTube’s annotation tools to provide a rough textual alternative, which he then refines further to form the captioning track and video transcript. He also has a web developer who is able to augment the embedded YouTube video player with controls that allow for keyboard-only users to manipulate the video directly.

Visitors are invited to comment either by text comments or video comments on the YouTube video, and they are similarly encouraged to embed the video on their own site.

Nathan’s team is overwhelmed with the response from the public, and temporarily allocate additional resources to moderating and collating comments while measuring the usage of the consultation video using third-party-hosted analysis tools.

Subjects:

• Videos
• Embedded