Publishing Documentaries on the Internet?

gehel asks: "While working in Rwanda as a computer engineer, I've had a discussion with a small NGO that produces video documentaries. Internews produces videos about Rwanda to raise the population awareness on different issues, mainly the Gacaca popular court for reconciliation. Those videos are the shown in public projections all over Rwanda. They would be interested in distributing this content to a larger audience: the internet. They have the rights to their documentaries, and are willing to distribute them under a Creative Common license, so we could use the Internet Archives to host the files, however we'd still have to find a good front end. I have been looking into a couple of solutions. Ourmedia is a bit too complicated to use, the Broadcast Machine doesn't seem ready for prime time, so I'm back to the standard Joomla!. I'm pretty sure there is the perfect solution somewhere, but I cant find it. Could you help me? "The perfect solution would be a Content Management System oriented toward video publishing, that can interact well with the Internet Archives. The ability to create RSS feeds for different media (French/English/Kinyarwanda with high/low quality versions) would be a plus.

Also, if anybody can help us with a good design, then suggestions are welcomed!"

Comments

Google Video?

[Salvance]

Why not just upload them to Google Video? There's practically no limit on file size, and you would receive a much broader audience. You would also be able to just embed the videos into your web pages, no need to find a front-end ... although I imagine the quality might be a little lower, and you would have no guarantee that it would stay hosted there.

Another option may be to host it on the Internet Archive, but then upload a highlight video to Google Videos to raise awareness of the full documentary.

Documentaries Currently Preach to the Choir

[Invidious]

This's something that's always annoyed me about documentaries: people don't get to see them. They show in a very small number of theaters -- I don't care how fantastic it is, I'm not going to travel far out of my way to see one -- and the only people who buy DVDs of the things are the converted Choir, as it were. They're not distributed far enough to make any real impression, to do what they are, by nature, created to do: educate people.

Documentary filmmakers need to find a way to reach a wider audience. I'd suggest putting them up for DL in limited resolution, but with high quality sound, so that the Documentary stops being an artsy wank-fest and actually becomes a useful tool.