The YouTube and stream dump problem

In the past the CCC has decided to not run its own YouTube account as we didn’t want to advertise this service. Despite the growing success and continual improvements to media.ccc.de as a streaming platform, people still want to watch CCC talks on YouTube. Unfortunately, many YouTube accounts have shown up which claim to be official CCC accounts. We ignored this for a long time as it was a nice service for the viewer and hey – it’s CC-BY content. However there are some problems with these accounts which we will address later.

To understand the problem we need to discuss another topic, stream dumps. In the past when the release of congress talks sometimes took a few days, stream dumps have been a nice way to watch a talk that you have missed before the final releases where available. But stream dumps have lower quality than the final releases – because the streams also have a lower quality for bandwidth reasons. They also have a watermark applied to show clearly that they are just stream dumps. Stream dumps often contain audio / video from breaks between the talks which can be anything from private conversations near an open mic to just noise.

To remove the need for stream dumps we have built a video on demand portal for your convenience and everything is now instantly available on our own video platform http://media.ccc.de/.

And here is the problem with the rogue CCC YouTube accounts: we politely ask every year for stream dumps to be removed; not only for the reasons above but also because the stream dumps miss the correct metadata, and are often published under the wrong license. This is also true for final releases that are published by these rogue CCC accounts. A look at the view counts of these stream dumps shows a huge number of people are watching ugly SD stream dumps from events that are available professionally edited in crystal-clear HD.

We recently learned about another problematic point: some of these accounts participate in the Youtube advertisement program, which means they display ads next to our videos. We do all of our work as a non-profit and want our viewers to get the content without ads and in case of media.ccc.de without any retention of their personal data. Running a YouTube account with high viewer counts and ads is basically profiting unfairly from content that is provided free of charge by our speakers, produced free of charge by the CCC orga team and brought to you free of charge by the video team.

To mitigate this we have decided to open an official media.ccc.de YouTube channel to at least make sure users don’t have to suffer advertisements, incorrect licenses and incomplete metadata. This account can be found on https://www.youtube.com/mediacccde.

As all attempts to contact the account owners have failed we ask you to not use these channels, feel free to leave a comment on the video that they need to get in touch with the CCC. From now on we will publish everything we are allowed to on YouTube so these accounts will have no reason to exist.

We are aware that we could have chosen a stricter license for the streams in order to have a stronger legal basis. We would very much like to avoid doing so. Due to the new Video-On-Demand feature it should no longer be required to publish stream dumps.

We strongly encourage you to use http://media.ccc.de/ or if you like a more simple view http://cdn.media.ccc.de/; and if you link to a video on your twitter / facebook / diaspora / you name it, think twice which platform is the best to watch a talk about ITSec, digital surveillance or building a rocket.

The VOC team