Case Study: The Political Climate of Live Streaming
The effort put into the webcast demonstrates the importance of this medium for the UNFCCC. The secretariat is using it to accommodate the increased interest in climate change, as well as the transparency necessary with the political process. Requests via the internet and visit numbers to the webcast are continually rising from one conference to the next. In order to take into account users' most varied requirements and the webcast's so far neglected networking possibilities, the webcast platform has been fundamentally reworked and has had extra features added.
"In the spring of 2009, we sat down with UNFCCC and the Danish government and discussed the new requirements of the webcast. The main aim of the new concepts was an increase in its networking within the internet and, above all, its usability. However, all new features had to be added without creating the need for additional personnel or editorial work during the conference," says meta-fusion managing director Matthias Döring.
"We have worked hard on the usability of the webcast pages. A preview on all channels was necessary above all due to the fact that the seven live channels had to be broadcast from seven different halls," Döring continues.
"Our ‘Webcast-Display' provides the perfect solution. The Webcast-Display shows small live thumbnails from all rooms and complements these with the current subtitles. The preview pictures provide the user with a simultaneous overview of all the rooms. The Webcast-Display can be adapted to various CIs and the number of the preview pictures and can be included in any external website via iframe.
"Our webcast editors always post the current agenda point as a subtitle on the live videos. We have now also put this live text on Twitter (http://twitter.com/cop15liveagenda). When the individual meetings appear in the on-demand archive, this is automatically published within an RSS feed. All on-demand videos have been labelled with our Simple Sequence Embedding [SSE]. The user can then set his or her own start and stop points and thus select sections of a session. The resulting individually generated code is freely available and allows videos to be embedded in any internet site. The new networking possibilities made branding of the videos necessary
with a station identifier and watermark for each video.
"Our localisation function is a very simple, yet very user-friendly improvement; it offers the user an automatic time conversion for the respective time zone. All search, sort, and selection criteria have been revised, and a calendar has been added.
"In addition, the webcast site can now be issued in various skins. All participating organisations thus receive their ‘own' official webcast.
"Since the climate change conference in Bali, the UNFCCC also have their ‘own' podcast and YouTube channel [www.youtube.com/climate conference]. The channel is aimed at the representatives of the online media and offers a 3-minute edit of all official press conferences."
All in all, the webcasting of the COP 15 has taken the UNFCCC's webcast service to a new level. In addition to the unexpected audience numbers and the scope and number of sessions broadcast, now free inclusion and networking of any webcast element is possible. For an institution such as the U.N., this is a milestone similar to the advent of the first webcast 10 years ago.