Forum:Making bioinformatics help and tutorials open

Question

[Emily]

Not trying to blow our own trumpet here, more set a context, but at Ensembl we're really keen to produce online help that's free and open for people to access wherever they might be. One of the ways we do this is a YouTube channel which is very popular. YouTube, however, is not accessible everywhere. We know that a lot of people access Ensembl from China, where YouTube is definitely banned, so we set up a YouKu channel for them, which is also pretty popular. However we are aware of a small number of countries, possibly where Ensembl is less popular but still, if there are people who want the stuff we should do our best to get it to them, where YouTube is also banned and we don't think a website entirely in Chinese is the best way forward for them. I don't think it's feasible to set up video streaming channels in all of these countries, but rather to find a way that we can broadcast to all of them. Does anybody know how we might do this? We're already considering SciVee and I've emailed them to ask if they have any censorship problems.

[Chris Evelo]

Did you ever contact YouTube about this? It might be possible to work with them to do some tagging for science videos for countries where only part of the contents is blocked because of copyright reasons, most notably Germany.

And about Youku, I asked a collaborator in Iran, who checked and found it is not available from there.

[Devon Ryan]

At least in the case of Germany, things will only get blocked if they contain music (blame GEMA), so that's an easy enough issue to get around.

Answer 1

[Jeremy Leipzig]

I think it's important to present tutorials in a culturally relevant manner. Take for instance, this Turkish broadcast on post-translational protein modifications:

[Emily]

This might take my entire make-up stash, but I think I can do it.

[cdsouthan]

Why not just invite them over, give 'em the Ensembl script and run the camera?

[Jeremy Leipzig]

I think they already signed with UCSC

[Chris Evelo]

That is the first time ever I see anyone giving a plausible reason to add make-up cost to a grant proposal's budget.

Answer 2

[Istvan Albert]

Your best bet is probably to also offer the videos from your own web site in a downloadable format.

Any other centralized location is bound to ruffle some feathers only to end up being banned in various countries.

[Emily]

Personally, I prefer to to stream videos to watch them rather than download, so if we were going to do anything I'd prefer it to be streamable. Not sure what our web guys would say if we asked them to make us a video hosting/streaming page either!

[Istvan Albert]

One thing to look out are the characteristics of the people that you are trying to reach with the extra features. Those that are not able to stream youtube may also have intermittent internet access, or low bandwidth. Few things are more discouraging than slow internet access when streaming content.

[Emily]

Vimeo seems to offer both streaming and downloading, which is quite nice.

Answer 3

[Cytosine]

I think Vimeo is a good alternative to YouTube with a bit more professional look.

Googling it up it seems there are quite a few alternatives on the market:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/top-12-sites-watch-videos-youtube/

How about developing one in house? It would certainly be less ban-prone than these other hosting websites.

[Emily]

Cool, thanks. I don't think we'll ever get rid of our YouTube channel, but we might think about replicating our stuff on other sites.

[Emily]

Meh, Vimeo is blocked in Turkey, China and Indonesia.

[pld]

Vimeo is far less strict about the content that can be posted with respect to YouTube.

Answer 4

[pld]

What about seeing if there are local flavors of YouTube in each country, I realize it could be a bit tedious to manage but it might be the easiest way to ensure that your videos are available.

Another thought on accessibility is that some people may not have sufficient internet connections to allow streaming, either in the speed they have or if some countries have very expensive data rates. If there's only streaming, each time someone wants to watch a video, they have to have the bandwidth each time. If they can download videos to their local machine, they can watch them without an internet connection.

This might seem a bit crude, but a PDF and a MP3 of the sound might be useful to people who have limited internet connectivity.