“You guys are amazing, no question. BUT….”
I just received this in my inbox this morning. I’m not sure what to do. Your input and feedback on a possible solution is appreciated — Mark
“You guys are amazing, no question. BUT….
“We in Southern Africa have massive bandwidth issues. We have an enormous SharePoint community, and this site is the first place we send end users. But since you have taken the screencast / video route, we have not been able to use it much anymore.
“With our lack of bandwidth, it is just not viable to try and watch videos.To give you an example,to watch a 1.05 minute clip takes 7:35 minutes. You can understand our frustration?
“While the big companies out here don’t have that problem, there are hundreds of smaller companies and end users who are reliant on 3G access – and it is sheer torture. PLEASE will you make all your video clip stuff available in blog / document version as well. Please. There are very few places end users can get SharePoint help, and with you out the picture we are flying blind.
“I know it’s going to be a lot of work, but the whole of Africa needs this site and we all have the same problem with bandwidth. Have pity on 3rd world countries please. We are choked by monopolies out of our control.”
This is a really good point and a concern from more than just a bandwidth issue. From an accessibility perspective it is also a gap. It also makes it sometimes more complicated to consume (mobilility of the information) and cannot be ‘printed’ or consumed by traditional means. (Requires digital devices to share where as a blog or article can be printed removing this potential limitation.)
The issue is time and energy. A video actually does take less time to craft often than a blog entry or document which contains the same content. If you think of the phrase “a picture says a thousand words” a video shows hundreds of pictures in a relatively short amount of time which compounds the issue. The result is very long documents, or transcripts to provide the same amount of information as a video. What I would recommend is to make videos available for download (not just streaming) as a starting point.
All of the content I have seen (more or less) on this site is also available in document format somewhere on the internet, so I don’t see it as a gap necessarily. However perhaps a more extensive summary of what each video contains could really help close the gap?
Would love to get more feedback from this group and others around the world who run into these kinds of issues as they are things I have considered and run into working with many international organizations where these same issues occur.
Richard Harbridge
If the screencasts are fairly short, as most of yours are, you could try having a plain text transcript available as a link below the video when it is posted.
I know people that travel Africa, Congo, Egypt, Tunisia, and even South Africa; I’m told that bandwidth is tough. What a westerner does is head for any kind of cafe or other place with wifi access to Internet, 3G there is good for messaging and other text related content.
One idea is to release screencasts additionally in audio form and encourage the screencast makers to include audio direction in their content creation. Making document directions takes a lot of time and I’m not sure your content providers will want to do that.
I do feel for Africa as a whole. I hope that the upcoming wave of WiMax coming there will happen sooner rather than later. I have heard that Clear is talking to companies there with China being a large instigator of WiMax being deployed in Africa.
A suggestion I have is make these videos/screencasts downloadable so folks w/ slow connectivity can download it and watch it later
Lori makes a great point. A simple text transcript of the audio would at least let the visitor know if this is something worth waiting to download.
It’s easier to wait for the download when you know there’s something good coming.
Could Google Voice or a similar service be used to create the transcript from audio? I know my Google Voice messages are transcribed to a text message and sent to my phone. Could help automate.
- Jeff
My suggestion would be three-fold:
1) Transcode the video for low bandwidth performance (56K or less). It’s an extra step that could be automated and the site would just provide two links (high bandwidth and low bandwidth)
2) If the content, in text format, exists elsewhere, have supplemental links to the text content along with the video
3) If all else fails, provide a download for the video with RM enabled (to protect your content)
- Shawn
My sister still has to use dialup to get to the internet if she isn’t usings someone’s cable connection. I feel for her at times but that’s her only option. Does the whole of the internet have to cater to dial up users?
The most feasible solution is to dual encode the video at a high bandwidth version and a dial up version or have a link to an audio only version. This is going to reduce the quality of the videos, perhaps making some useless if it is a detailed how to screen cast.
Or license your content to an African based third party to redistribute and display in a more feasible solution for those users.
i live in argentina so i know about low bandwidth. i subscribe rss from my outlook client. there is a link on each mail that have screencast to download the entire video.
i love your screencast and you encourage me to implement this kind of videos in the company where i work.
sometimes i download them to my pc to watch them offline.
the last laura video posted is linked as http://content.screencast.com/users/EndUserSharePoint/folders/SharePoint – Data View Web Part/media/e33333f9-2307-4580-aaff-cc57330a86f9/2009-09-29-NewWindow.camrec.wmv
thank you for all your content shared with us and sorry 4 my poor english :)
Mark, would it help to put markers into the file in Camtasia, that would break it into smaller files for downloading, plus provide some menuing. (This would also reduce your bandwidth usage as someone who doesn’t finish the video in one sitting can jump to the part they want without loading the whole thing.)
And most of us (I think) produce our content in written form before we create the screencast. (OneNote is awesome for this, especially for grab & pasting screenshots!), so providing the content in a printable format shouldn’t be too much extra effort.
Hope that helps!
Blessings,
Jim Bob
Maybe somebody has suggested this already but what about making a torrent file available for each month of video? The torrent could be left to download over a 3G card overnight or while not in use in these remote places.
I know it would not make it any faster (slower in fact) but it would make the content on EUS site available in manageable blocks.
Africa’s problem is close to MY problem — and no I do not live there. I’m in the good old U.S.A. where for security reasons videos are BLOCKED completely. So is Camtasia.
And like the gentleman who wrote, ever since you have gone to almost videos for EVERYTHING I rarely find ANYTHING in recent “stuff” [that's a technical term :-)] that is useful. I’m still a heavy reader of the forum.
Having had to transcribe video into text, I know from experience that it “ain’t easy” or “quick”.
I wish I COULD wait 8 minutes for a 2 minute video. At least I would be seeing it.
The potential to be able to download a video might be a viable option. Any text transcriptions would be wonderful.
I agree with Richard’s comment: most of the time, “the content is also available in document format somewhere on the internet”. Also, videos show stuff that could not be easily described in a document – animations, or speed of execution for example.
When I have bandwidth issues, what I usually do is let the video run in the background (volume off), then get back to the page after it’s completely downloaded and hit replay.
Ok, here’s an experiment. I have put a “download” link on the most recent recording of “Today in SharePoint with Michael Gannotti”. Let’s see how many downloads there are as opposed to direct views.
Here’s the link to the article:
http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2009/10/01/2009-10-01-today-in-sharepoint-with-michael-gannotti-recording/
Mark
Mark,
I was going to suggest a download link for each but Dux beat me to it! Big advantage of the download method is that it makes it much easier to go back to the video/audio recording at a later date if needed. Shaun’s suggestion of adding RM to them is also a good idea so you can protect your content.
I agree with the post but for different reasons:
I find myself not viewing a lot of the screencasts because I am looking for resources for clients/students and I do not have enough time to view the entire thing to figure out if it has the details I need in it. I usually say take a look at this post I think it might have what you need. So in this case a document or text would be helpful to ensure I am pointing them at the right resource.
However, I think the screencasts are extremely helpful at showing people how something is done. I write a lot of documentation and it can be difficult to describe at time where to click.
I think there have been a lot of great suggestions given for possible solutions.
I am so thrilled to read all these empathetic and constructive responses. It really makes a difference to know you are being heard. Just a note to everyone supplying videos to please put the size of the clip as well as the duration in the description so we know what we are in for. It will really help with planning what to watch or download with the pay as you go services and caps on bundles we have. Awesome replies EUS and users, I’m very impressed! :)
For the record, people in China have much bigger issues as, besides the bandwidth limitation, access to most western blogs is blocked, as well as access to Twitter and Youtube…
I work in consulting, and am currently at a client where all video content has been blocked. It’s truly a shame, but I believe more and more companies are implementing some sort of control over internet use, in particular videos.
I used to be a regular visitor to your site, reading a lot on my lunch time. Not only is the video content less accessible because of company policies, but there is also no way to quickly browse through and find exactly what you need. Text still seems the most interesting option to me, with some video to spice up the site.