I took at a quick look at Films on Demand, a video service that Mike recently set up a trial for. Here are some quick thoughts:
Content
- The trial version seems to contain just a subset of the total collection of videos available to subscribers, making it hard to judge the scope of the contents.
- Each video is broken up into segments. You can watch the whole video straight through or go straight to a segment (each segment has a title, run time, and description).
Navigation
- You can search against the metadata for the videos (title, subject, producer, date, and words in the description) or you can browse by broad subjects and drill down
- Each video has a “related videos” tab (much like YouTube) that can lead you to similar content
- You can create playlists or save favorites (I didn’t try this)
Sharing and Linking
- There are stable URLs for each film but there doesn’t seem to be a stable URL for each segment (which would be a nice thing to have if you want to link straight to a specific section of film).
- There is no way to embed videos that I could see. Users must watch all films on the Films on Demand website. It would be great if videos could be embedded on course blogs, in Blackboard, etc. (someone would have to figure out how to make the embedded video only playable after the user has authenticated in some way).
My Take
- We clearly need to think about ways to bring more video content to our students and faculty. They’re asking for it often and, as a communication format, video is becoming increasingly important.
- I don’t know if the kind of video content that students ask for at reference desk can be found in this database, though (offhand, I can’t recall the exact topics that students hope to find videos for, but they tend to be related to business communications issues). The trial version we have suggests that there may be many business videos (the subject page for “Business and Economics” videos is pretty granular in subtopics) but we can only see in this trial ten of the videos in this category.
- With each passing day, there is more and more video content freely available online. Finding what you want, though, remains a challenge, as searchable metadata for videos in YouTube, Vimeo, etc. is pretty limited. Films on Demand does make the videos more easily found via a simple subject category system and by extensive annotations for all video content. We could subscribe to this database (no word on costs) or we could just try to get better at finding relevant video content that is freely online (and perhaps curating those finds on LibGuides).
- Bottom line: what would be the cost for this service? If it’s too high ($3000 or more a year) then maybe we should focus on improving our abilities to find and curate free video content.