The Open Video Alliance (OVA), a group that seeks to promote adoption of standards-based open video technologies, has launched a new campaign encouraging users to upload videos to the Wikipedia website. The goals behind this new campaign are to visually enrich the online encyclopedia and promote awareness of the value that open video technologies can bring to the Web.
The OVA's members include open video platform company Kaltura, Yale's Information Society Project, Mozilla, and the Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF). To get the party started, the PCF is making available a new software tool for Windows and Mac OS X that can convert videos into the open Ogg Theora format. The OVA has rolled out a new website with simple instructions that describe how users can download the software and start participating in the campaign.
Wikipedia is a strong supporter of open media formats, particularly Ogg. Virtually all of the existing audio and video material that is included in the online encyclopedia is encoded in Ogg Theora Vorbis and Theora respectively. In an interview with Beet.tv last year, Wikimedia Foundation deputy director Erik Moller explained why the organization is committed to open video and won't use proprietary plug-ins to play multimedia. He envisions a future in which open video editing tools will enable users to collaboratively manipulate interactive media in much the same way that Wikipedia users edit text entries today.
Ogg codecs are thought to be unencumbered by patents, which means that implementations can be developed and distributed without paying royalties. Royalty-free formats are essential to ensuring universal access and guaranteeing that users can repurpose content—priorities that are at the core of Wikipedia's mission. Mozilla, which supports Ogg with the HTML5 video element in recent versions of Firefox, made a $100,000 donation last year to Ogg development group Xiph.org through the Wikimedia Foundation. Mozilla and the Wikimedia Foundation are both committed to opening up video on the Web and making it as inclusive as possible.
Not all browser vendors are supporting the codec, however. Apple's Safari browser only supports H.264 and it is said that Microsoft's nascent HTML5 video implementation in the company's recently-unveiled Internet Explorer 9 prototype also similarly only supports the patent-encumbered codec. Google's Chrome Web browser supports both Ogg and H.264. The OVA hopes that increased availability of useful Ogg-encoded video content on Wikipedia will help to encourage broader support for the codec. As one of the most popular websites on the Internet, Wikipedia indeed has considerable clout.
"Wikipedia is the most popular site in the world that posts video exclusively in open formats (specifically, theora). The steadfast commitment that the Wikimedia Foundation has to open information, tools, and formats, is amazing. They truly put their values first," wrote Nicholas Reville of the PCF in a blog entry. "By encouraging more people to post videos in Wikipedia articles, we can bring theora video played in HTML5 to a very large audience."
As all content uploaded to Wikipedia must be licensed under an open Creative Commons license, the OVA's Wikipedia video campaign could be a major win for open content availability in addition to open video. Compiling a rich body of CC-licensed reference video will be a very productive and useful endeavor in and of itself.
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