DVDMagazine:Main Page
From ACT4D Project Wiki
Contents |
What is it
Vast parts of India do not have access to the Internet, or even if they do have access to the Internet (through GPRS or other technologies) they do not have access to a decent bandwidth. As a result, they remain out of touch with the growing impact that ICT can have on their lives.
These are days when ICT and social networks are leading to emancipation in every sphere of our lives. Any act of corruption, any act of injustice reach millions of people online within seconds. Days are already here when social networks will play a bigger role than the media. In fact social networks have enabled people to uncover the hoodwinking games that the media play with the people.
Panning to a rural setting in our country, the people there are completely deprived of the benefits that ICT could have brought to their lives. We may not be able to take bandwidth (in terms of networks) to them in a cost effective way, but there are other means of taking bandwidth to people. Recall Tanenbaum's book on Computer Networks which warned us not to undermine the bandwidth of a truck full of magnetic tapes? We plan to take information to these people through DVDs.
DVD Magazines
We are quite familiar with printed magazines: these are booklets catering to a certain topic and are brought out periodically. We are also familiar with the concept of e-books: books in an electronic form to be read on a multimedia device. The concept of a DVD magazine is, however, new. It has the regular features of being periodic and concerning a certain topic. It too is electronic. But it is to be viewed/read from a regular DVD player (one that attaches to your PAL/NTSC TV). But it will not behave as a static video: one will be able to interact with it through the remote control that comes with the DVD player.
We plan to design a system that will enable a user to produce a DVD magazine through a few clicks. A user will be able to:
- Select videos from a pool of videos.
- Select advertisers from a pool of ads.
- Reorder the videos and ads.
- Potential advertisers can add ads.
- Users can add contents to the pool of videos.
- User can get the necessary funding from the advertisers (so it is a self-sustaining project).
The Workflow
- The workflow actually works in cycles. A user chooses a few videos, ads, surveys, feedback on the previous issue and produces a news issue. This is distributed and feedback on the current issue collected and sorted out for the next issue.
- The pool of videos is continually built up by adding relevant videos to the pool based on keywords. Videos are added by suitably crawling the web
- Advertisers log in and add their ads and choose the videos that they would like to tag their ads with.
Current Work
Currently we are focussing on getting the content from the IndiaUnheard website.
Present work is on sketching the various modules, etc. that we will need. We have roughly figured out the need for the following interfaces:
- Administrator
- Home
- About Us
- Video Search
- Region Search
- Select and make ISO
- keyword Search
- Select and make ISO
- Region Search
- About Ads
- Policies and rules
- Upload (including expiry date)
- Banner
- Video clip
- Text
- Picture
- Feedback
- IVR Listen (for admin only)
- Post feedback
- photo, name, region, age, video identifier (code)
- sms database
- Forum
- Q+A
- Freeboard
- issue specific info
Webserver
Interfaces
