Dem Convention Gets Online Video Right… Sorta

The best thing about online video is getting to catch up on the stuff I missed on regular TV. Case in point: last night’s speech by Michelle Obama. Naturally the Dems have made a video of the speech available online, so I thought I’d track it down this morning. The experience was pretty cool: beautiful picture, no stuttering, links to other videos and the live event schedule. But there were several things that could have been better.

First some tips on the obvious stuff:

  1. Don’t cut off the end of Michelle Obama’s speech in the middle of a sentence. This is not rocket-science video editing.
  2. Please add a “close” button when the video is in full-screen mode. Don’t make me figure out I have to hit escape or at least Alt-Tab to get to a different open application. (This bugged me about Joost when I first tried it.)
  3. If you’re going to have a collection of videos, make them all available in the on-demand video gallery instead of making recent highlights only accessible from a link on the front page.

Then there’s the less obvious stuff that would still make the online video experience better:

  1. Give me a transcript (or link to one). I know that kind of defeats the purpose of online video, but sometimes I don’t have time to watch a whole speech. Give me the option of scanning the text too.
  2. Create links to the speech from obvious places, like the regular DNC site. There is no direct link to Michelle Obama’s speech from the DNC’s front page, only from the front page of the DemConvention site.
  3. Give me some video I can embed on my site. Don’t want to lose control of the messaging? Fine. Choose some good sound bites and just make those clips embeddable.

The DemConvention site is far from the only place to get online video of this week’s events, so many of the above nitpicks can be avoided by choosing another news source. Still, as the official online home of the event, I’d like to see the site make some video improvements. At least the obvious ones.