MDN/Projects/Development/Videos

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then surely a moving picture is worth a million words.

There are already several cases in which we are using videos to inform, to educate, and to advocate about the open Web (as well as Mozilla technologies like Firefox OS). However, each instance of this has to date been treated as a one-off, with videos placed on video hosting sites such as YouTube. We should have a standardized plan for managing these videos.

Note: As part of this project, we are evaluating the possibility of using Air Mozilla to host (and possibly even to produce) MDN's videos. This evaluation is being tracked in bug 1154699.

Videos on MDN may include things like:

• Demonstrations of what the result of some code should look like (to be viewed by people whose browser doesn't yet support the feature, for example).
• Tutorial videos demonstrating how to do specific tasks.
• Longer lesson videos teaching coursework.
• Demonstrations of how to use features such as the developer tools.
• Promotional material for MDN events and activities.

It's worth noting that since we currently are not well optimized for hosting and presenting videos, we don't necessarily have examples of all of these in use at this time. The goal is to get there!

Must haves

These items are absolutely critical. Must-have items should be treated as the absolute minimum viable product; if any one of the items in this section is not in the finished product, the project is considered a failure.

• Ability to host large pre-recorded videos in a performant way.
• Ability to embed the videos in articles on the MDN wiki.
• Broad support for a variety of devices and bandwidth levels.
• Low cost to Mozilla financially.
• Ability to attach a detailed description text to each video.
• IRC backchannel link to #mdn.

Should haves

Features considered should haves are those which, while still as important functionally as those in the must have list, can be delayed slightly in order to achieve a minimum viable product on schedule, and/or have workarounds that enable the product to be used without them for a short time until the features can be built as a follow-up to the initial launch.

• A permissions model that allows us to grant upload/approve/moderation privileges to non-staff users.
• Support for adding sub-titles for various locales as well as the original language of the video.
• Ability to correlate videos with context; that is, if viewing the video off of MDN, there should be a way to provide at least one link back to the article that covers the topic at hand.
• Easy, convenient video uploading process.
• Ability to load a new video with the play position set to a given offset into the video.
• Videos should show up on search engines.
• Statistics tracking including visit counts, play counts, follows/subscriptions, etc.

Could haves

Those items on this list are less important than the features in the prior groups, but would be nice to have. These may include items that can add significant usability gains for marginal development cost.

• Support for re-dubbing the vocals into alternate languages.
• An API for retrieving information about videos (title, available localizations, available sizes and bandwidth levels, duration, etc.).
• Ability to trigger an action when given points in the video are reached; for instance, it would be great to be able to show specific snippets of code (or a slide from a presentation) when the speaker reaches the corresponding part of their talk.
• A built-in suite of tools for editing videos, adding titles and images, and so forth.
• Mozilla Popcorn integration (related to the previous point) would be cool.
• Optional parameter in URL to set play position at load time.

Won't haves

These are items or capabilities that are outside the scope of this project, at least for the time being. They are in fact be functions we do wish to have, but they are the lowest-priority items, and should therefore be the first things to go if things have to be dropped in order to meet the project schedule. This list can also include genuinely low-priority or low-impact ideas.

• API to allow script to change the current play position.
• Commenting on videos.