User-contributed video immediately became popular when YouTube was launched. Right away, amateur video production took off and very soon after that commercial organizations started to upload more professionally produced content. Now there is a mix of professionally produced and amateur material, and sometimes the amateur material is so well produced that it is hard to tell the difference. The tools that professionals previously bought at a premium are now within the budget of amateurs or have been augmented with open-source equivalent applications available for free.

YouTube and Vimeo are huge resources of content when you are looking for music videos, entertainment and tutorials. They are not the only online services by any means, but they are ranked at the top when counting the number of user engagements.

Is Streaming Taking Over From Linear Broadcasting?

The available content on streaming services is evolving to more closely resemble traditional TV in terms of its scope, genre and production values.

The shift to streamed services is already happening faster than we expected with the uptake of YouTube and services such as BBC iPlayer becoming first choice viewing destinations. This is especially true of the younger generation who are scarcely aware that appointment viewing was ever ‘a thing’. We already have the closure and dismantling of terrestrial broadcasting on the horizon.

There is a definite trend underway to migrate what might have been a linear TV program into a more podcast-like format. Industry has coined the term Vodcasting to describe it.

According to a recent Ofcom study, YouTube has become the second most popular service after the BBC in the UK. This is particularly true for younger viewers who make it their first choice viewing destination. Meanwhile, older viewers are watching streaming services more frequently than linear services compared to their viewing habits a couple of years ago.

Streaming Services Overview

There is a useful list of streaming services on Wikipedia, but with the constant churn of new services being launched and others being deprecated, this list can never be 100% up to date. Nevertheless, it is probably the most comprehensive source for listing streaming services.

The list is organized according to the number of subscribers:

Not many of these services accept unsolicited user-generated content. Most of them deliver professionally produced programs. Some of them accept advertising inserts in a similar way to user-generated submissions to platforms like Vimeo and YouTube.

Sharing Content

These major social-media platforms are the most likely places to share your content:

Of course, there are other alternative platforms or use cases and new services are frequently being introduced. In fact, with streaming services growing at such a rate, there are more opportunities for you to get your content in front of more people. Here we look at some of the things to look out for, what things to do, and what things to avoid.

Newsgathering From Remote Locations

Social media has facilitated newsgathering from remote locations so that a journalist carries much less equipment these days. Embedding journalists with troops in war zones is often very dangerous and carrying bulky equipment is a great disadvantage if you need to move to another location quickly.

If a mobile satellite link can be established, then content can be sent back to the main newsroom from anywhere in the world. Being able to shoot broadcast quality footage on a mobile phone and get it back to base quickly is a huge thing.

Modern missile systems have built-in targeting that looks for RFI emissions on the basis that if there is some electronic equipment in use, then it is likely to be located in a command-and-control center. Faraday cage screening is fine for static locations but it is not practical for a journalist travelling on foot. Being able to shoot and uplink your footage quickly, turn off your equipment and put it in a small metal tin right away has a distinct survival advantage.

If you are contributing content for use by news organizations, ensure it is fully documented so the provenance can be verified. You should be remunerated, especially if the content is editorially important. There are intermediaries who can help although they will likely deduct a commission fee.

Upload Specifications & Automated Workflows

Delivery specifications for broadcast and streaming companies are designed to streamline a workflow process and aid the automated delivery of content from a production company to the content store underpinning a broadcast or streaming portal.

We looked at the fundamental principles of Media Asset Management system design and implementation in our Managing Assets In Production Essential Guide earlier this year, which included a focus on automation. In the creation of automated workflows, MacOS/Windows/Linux desktop workstations are easily powerful enough to write some checking scripts to verify your content before uploading. The upload specifications for content are similar but less exacting in their quality requirements. Even so, there are some important criteria that need to be observed and these are generally common across all the platforms.

Analyzing the specifications for these services gives us a good set of aggregated parameters that are widely compliant. There are a few specific requirements that apply to one platform or another.

Aggregating these technical requirements informs the recommendations under each specification property in the following discussions. Those recommendations are derived from this representative sample of social-media platform specifications:

• YouTube.
• Vimeo.
• Facebook.
• Instagram.
• LinkedIn.
• BrightCove.
• Amazon.

The YouTube uploading instructions are concise and straightforward and this platform is probably the easiest to upload your footage onto. Its requirements are not very complex and it has a powerful transcoding system that creates a variety of different formats from your ingested content.

The transcoder cannot introduce genuine detail that isn’t there even if AI solutions are applied. It needs to be presented with reasonably good quality ingest material from the outset. Down-sampling produces satisfactory results, up-sampling tends to lose detail and only increases bandwidth without improving the appearance. Always submit the highest quality you can.

It is possible to upload 4K content, but for many applications this is far too large. High Definition 2K is probably suitable for most applications at a resolution of 1920 x 1080. Modern networks and codecs are efficient enough that there is little need to downgrade to SD. That might be optimal for some content though.

The Vimeo uploading descriptions go into considerably more detail about the fine points of color models. Vimeo also provides detailed guidelines for exporting content from the editing tools you are most likely to use.

Facebook describes picture orientation better than most. The Amazon Prime specification is a good source of fundamentals too.