[artdutra04]

Right now teams post content everywhere, on team sites, Chief Delphi, YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Flickr, Picassa... During the competition season trying to find videos or photos of robots is difficult. Most can be found with enough persistence, but it's difficult. The content usually already exists, so a very good feature would be to help get a lot of the external content embedded or linked to from the TBA page.

One initial one would be to upload a photo to CD-Media, and tag it with YYYY robot and frcXXXX, where YYYY is the current year, and XXXX is your team number. Since the photo gets approved to CD, then it's an appropriate photo. This photo can either be an embedded image or a link to CD-Media. Maybe even cache the thumbnail and link to original on CD to avoid bandwidth leeching. This system would replace the current "email to TBA" means for getting team photos on the site, as it would use the the strengths of CD-Media and TBA to complement each other.

Another way would be to add in links to YouTube, Vimeo, Picasa, Flickr and/or content on a team's website (URL domain name must match the one listed in FIRST database) for additional videos and photos. I don't really like the idea of "team inputted robot information", as all teams beat their chest and exaggerate their abilities. But photos and videos of robots are harder to fake. It's easier to see if the team's claims are true.

Host official match video in a downloadable format on your server (h.264 or MPEG-4, so they're viewable on mobile devices). Upload the streaming versions of the match videos to YouTube or Vimeo. (Is there a Vimeo iPod/iPhone/iPad app?)

Create a means for user-submitted match videos on YouTube or Vimeo to be added to matches. Provides another point of view, and can help get some video for matches which have no official video recordings.

I've been thinking about using YouTube/Vimeo/Flickr tags or Twitter hashtags to automatically pull in content, but verifying it's authentic and not spam might be difficult. But this would be awesome if some kind of solution is worked out. (Maybe a team can have a specific "whitelist" of specific accounts to look for video/content from?) Maybe this solution can even be extended to matches: tag the match video with the proper naming convention already used for videos on the site, and it'll automatically pull the video into the site.

Sorry if these thoughts seem meandering. Just thinking out loud.