I love Sweden, the country I was born and live in. Of course I want to share all the wonders available here. Please see one of my earlier attempts. In low quality video, but of high emotional value.
This morning I begun writing this post when the ”Swedish channel” was introduced to the world at an event arranged by The Swedish instute, hosted at Svenska Filmbolaget. I was not sure where to direct you in order to check the new channel out. On our seats was a six page pamphlet. In it I finally found, the almost hidden, URL www.thenewsmarket.com/sweden.
All in all, what is dominantly communicated is ”The Newsmarket”, not Sweden. Hopefully this will change. In other words, I miss the connection between the content and the brand ”Sweden”. Both in the service discussed here, and in the content provided.
In sum, and please bear in mind that I have only spent around 30 minutes to take a look at the stuff in question. The Swedish channel is a very promising initiative. Although in my view balanced more to the slowly changing broadcast/main stream media environment, than the all so fascinating and frightening social media sphere. Furthermore, it is less about Sweden and more about the provider(s) of the services.
In the invitation e-mail (basically a jpg file, hard to share and pick items from) for this mornings event I could read:
”Does your business or organisation need more global exposure? The launch of the Swedish Channel provides you with the opportunity to globally reach 16 000 TV-stations and online media with moving images and press releases [my translation]”.
The audience, around 100 people, was briefly introduced to the background and the ideas behind the Swedish channel. By the way, a not so very search friendly term as it is indeed generic. Google tells me that it is actually TV4 that is the Swedish channel. The opening was followed by a short panel discussion and a Q&A with the audience. Beata Wickbom, one of the panelists, was eager to know how many of us blogged from the event. It seemed that I was the only one, and I mentioned that there was no WiFi provided (and my mobile operators coverage was low but usable),
I addition I shared my concerns that The News Market setup, seems to be geared towards (registered, image left) established news outlets, rather than social media savvy citizens. The panel replied that videos are immediately shareable through an embed code. But if you want the high resolution and editable, versions you need to register. So, I took a look at the embedding functionality (image below). Before I could get the embed code, I had to accept the terms. Those turned out to be a multi page long text (which can not be copied, printed out, or downloaded). Furthermore, I had to provide an e-mail adress. The result, when embedded here is found below (note ”The Newsmarket” is promoted, not Sweden):
Another obvious questions concerns copyright issues. Creative commons is more or less the de facto standard in social media. For a while I looked around for information about intellectual property rights. Finally, in the help page I found regarding the usage rights: ”Most of the content on The NewsMarket is free for use by the news media”. If so, that mean I cannot share/re-purpose it, unless I am news media.
Perhaps bloggers are news media (mark my irony). Registering as a blogger requires you to fill in name, e-mail, a password, physical adress, and information about my blog (assuming I have only one). The latter includes a description of the blog. They say that a good description will ”speed up the processing of your registration”. When I saw that I simply cancelled my registration. I also noticed that their publishing platform inhibits video ripping, i.e. use of tools that copies the stream onto ones hard drive. For me that means I most likely will not return to the Swedish Channel. But of course, without irony, a lot of interested journalists will most likely register in order to get the video material in a comparably very conventient fasion (download/e-mail/ftp).
Another interesting question from the audience was about who allows what can be uploaded. The answers was
”There will be a reference group. The point is to have a dialogue. There are different views on what Sweden is. We have no reason to take a side.”
I have my thoughs on that, guess you have too.
If you want to be inspired about how video can be used for brand building, take a look at www.ted.com/talks. That is an excellent combination of truly useful content, high emotional value, unique material, and state of the art sharing capabilities. An alternative to The Newsmarket is Newsdesk, which perhaps does not support raw high resolution video but is rich with sharing possibilities. Those include RSS and tagging. So you may tag your videos with ”Sweden” and ”Swedish channel”.
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