Mobile Media Toolkit

Background: Sharing Multimedia Content from Mobile Phones on the Web

What does this article cover?

This article covers tools that citizen journalists and reporters can use to publish multimedia recorded on their phones. The focus is on uploading content that was already produced on the phone (see our creating content section for more).

Who is this article for?

This article is intended for citizen journalists who want to publish multimedia content from their phones. It includes tips, tools, and techniques to put this multimedia content online. It is mainly meant for those without affiliations with news organizations or other publishing entities, but who need to publish content that can be accessed by others. However, reporters with existing publishing platforms may yet want to take note, and use the tools described in this article for experimentation.

Why should you share multimedia content from mobile phones on the web?

It is not just journalists who cover the news today. Citizen journalists uploading content to multimedia websites have reported many significant events. In fact, a prestigious 2010 journalism award was given to an anonymous citizen who filmed an iconic video on a mobile phone during the 2009 Iranian protests. There are many more examples of citizen-uploaded content being picked up by mainstream news as well as such content spreading virally and attracting millions of online viewers (like examples in researcher Janey Gordon's paper "The Mobile Phone and the Public Sphere").

Description: Sharing Multimedia Content from Mobile Phones to the Web

Uploading multimedia content (audio, photographs, and video) recorded on mobile phones to online hosting and sharing platforms.

Landscape: How is Multimedia Content shared from Mobile Phones important in Journalism and News Production today?

Camera phones are pervasive. In 2010, the number of camera phones worldwide was more than one billion. With recording devices in so many people's hands, more and more news is being recorded by citizens and put online.

Here are a few examples of such citizen reporting:

• There are many examples of mobile video reports (often captured by citizens) that have been featured in mainstream news, highlighting particular issues, or capturing unique moments and perspectives especially in repressive situations.
• BBC world stories reports on citizen video reporting in Kashmir, where citizens captured video of police and army brutality on their mobile phones. Citizens who were able to capture this content and spread it amongst themselves and to a wider audience could provide an alternative perspective on ground reality than the mainstream media were providing.
• The New York Times solicited photos from readers around the world to map a "moment in time" in May 2010. The call for submissions read: "The idea is to create an international mosaic, an astonishingly varied gallery of images that are cemented together by the common element of time." The call for submissions also encouraged submission from cellphones using a dedicated email address. The finished product is now displayed in an interactive visualization. The New York Times previously had another photo-submission contest when it asked readers to submit photographs taken on their cellphones. The results are here.
• Many more stories and case studies are presenting in our articles on creating multimedia content on the mobile phone. The article on recording video shares many examples of video reporting that was published online, as do the articles on taking photos and recording audio. In fact, the video and audio reporting articles also present examples of organizations like Voices of Africa, which do systematic trainings where they teach citizen journalists how to record video on their phone and publish it to news organizations.

There are many more examples of multimedia content captured on cell phones uploaded online that are either distributed virally, or picked up by mainstream news organizations. The content, as demonstrated, is mostly in photo and video form, although audio reporting is featured on particular podcasting and audio social networks such as Audioboo. Viral audio content will likely increase with the availability of new tools like Bubbly, and projects like Avaaz Otalo and Tribal News in India.

How To Share Multimedia Content from your Mobile Phones on the Web

The "We Are Media" social media guide offers a good introduction to video and photo sharing tools accessible online. The following articles are helpful in thinking about how and what to share online, and what the options available are "Video Sharing Online" and "Photo Sharing Online". The We are Media toolkit focuses on web uploading, but many of the same tools can be used on mobile phones.

Video Sharing

Among the video-sharing sites, YouTube is most friendly to those uploading video from their mobile phones. Descriptions of YouTube's mobile functionality on the Avec Mobile blog and YouTube itself. YouTube also has added some features that make uploads on their site particularly useful for media dissemination. Media organizations can use a tool called YouTube Direct to allow you to upload your videos to their sites easily. The tools have a variety of mobile features that media organizations can implement if they wish.

Journalists and citizen journalists can also stream live video directly from their phones when a data connection is available. For more on Live Streaming, please see the appropriate section.

For South African users, Zoopy is another alternative. Zoopy provides a java-based app that runs on many mobile phones and allows users to upload content. Other tools may allow you to upload video using email. Such video-hosting platforms include blogging platforms that allow e-mail uploads, as well as video-hosting sites Blip.TV and Photobucket. Many popular video-hosting sites don't offer mobile uploads, including: Vimeo, Viddler, Veoh, TubeMogul.

Mobile Blogging Tools: Video Sharing Platform

Mobile Blogging Tools: Video Sharing Platform (continued)

Photo Sharing

For photo-sharing, there are more options. Mashable lists more than 30 mobile photo-sharing applications that let you upload photos to online sites in a variety of ways. The most popular photo-sharing site Flickr supports uploads from the mobile web, has many mobile apps, and is supported by default by Nokia N series phones. It is possible to upload photos on most sites by browsing the site through a browser like Opera Mini (which optimizes many pages for mobile phones), and simply uploading photographs. Many photo-hosting sites also allow you to submit photos by e-mail.

We have pooled some of the really popular photo-sharing tools into a comparison matrix, where we compare the ways in which they allow mobile phones to upload images. (Note that there are many other photo-sharing services with mobile phone support, this matrix is perhaps the least exhaustive of our comparisons.)

Mobile Blogging Tools : Photo Sharing Platform

Mobile Blogging Tools : Photo Sharing Platform (Continued)

Audio Sharing

Audio-sharing becomes interesting and more diverse, as even phone calls can be used to share audio to the Web. Because of this much more diverse scenario, we have written both a scenario-by-scenario guide to sharing audio content, and collected together the tools in a matrix. The scenario-by-scenario guide is here, and the matrix is embedded below:

Mobile Blogging Tools : Audio Sharing Platform

Mobile Blogging Tools : Audio Sharing Platform (Continued)

Mobile Blogging Tools : Audio Sharing Platform (Continued)

Uploading Multimedia to Your Blog (or Microblogs)

Microblogging and blogging software also support mobile uploads of multimedia content. Twitter, the microblog, is linked to a number of multimedia uploading sites (see Mashable's top 5 twitter-related photo sites and video sites). For other microblogging support of multimedia content, visit the article on sharing content on microblogs.

For blogging with multimedia content, check out our article on sharing mobile content on blogs, especially on the column "multimedia supported." One particular project that has used multimedia blogging from mobile phones effectively is the Mobile Voices project, which uses Drupal and MMS to enable day laborers in the United States to blog.

More detailed coverage of microblogging is available in our article on microblogging, and more detailed coverage of blogging is available in our article on blogging.

Third-party Tools

There are also tools that will allow you to upload video and photos to many of these blogging and microblogging platforms. Shozu (which is available in 40 languages) and PixelPipe both offer applications that run on many mobile phones and let you upload photos and video to a variety of hosting websites. Ping.fm lets you do the same using just its mobile site. Below we list some of these media uploading tools:

Mobile Blogging Tools: Media Uploading Tool

Other tools, which host the media themselves rather than directly posting to microblogging and blogging services include: PixSense, Juice Caster, Cell Block, Pix Pulse, and Treemo. All of these services allow you to embed an "album" of the photos and videos you have uploaded to blogging and microblogging sites, and work using the mobile web or email. We would urge being careful using these services, however. None of the services is particularly popular (according to Alexa.com), and if the service you use shuts down, data you have uploaded to the sites may be lost.

Viral Multimedia Dissemination

Finally, there is also the possibility of messages spreading virally through peer-to-peer dissemination. Bluetooth is used in many places around the world as a free way of sharing audio and video to those in close contact. Viral distribution through bluetooth or simply by sending messages to friends and family can be another method of distribution. The Pew Center for Internet and Society notes that 54% of American adults have shared photos or videos with others. Consultant Tomi Ahonen also says that MMS is the most popular way in which people share pictures, and that "the second most common way to share pictures is 'side-loading' ie via bluetooth or via microSD memory cards, shared with friends."

Such peer-to-peer distribution models have been used to virally spread many kinds of materials. Unfortunately, there are not many documented examples of wide distribution of multimedia messages. There are reported cases of important viral SMS messaging: for example in providing commentary on the Zimbabwean as well other elections or for inciting hatred in Kenya and riots in Mozambique.

Limitations: Limitations of uploading multimedia content from your mobile phones

Uploading multimedia content from mobile phones has a number of limitations and issues to consider.

• Multimedia file sizes can get large, especially if it is of high quality or audiovisual material covering long timeframes. Uploading such files from mobile phones can take long times, or may mean high data costs.
• The easiest way to post multimedia is to corporate-owned sites, although terms and conditions may not be friendly for privacy-minded activists.
• Uploading content to a multimedia site is not enough for distributing the content--it is merely the first step. The content will need to be shared with others, and marketed in a variety of ways for it to reach a large number of viewers.