Fora.tv is one of the latest entrants onto the online video scene, and for policy wonks, it is also bound to be one of the most intetesting. Founded by a veteran of C-SPAN, the non-profit cable channel that broadcasts live Congressional sessions and other public affairs events in the US, Fora.tv hopes to offer visitors access to online videos of speeches that take place around the world each week.

C-SPAN is well-known for inducing yawns across a wide cross-section of the American public, but its unvarnished presentation of policy material remains popular among a small population of news junkies. Brian Gruber, Fora’s president and CEO (and C-SPAN’s marketing director in the 1980s) hopes to  tap into this same vein of enthusiasm, but with Web 2.0 bells and whistles.

Fora has built a slick video player that allows viewers to cut directly to the parts of a speech they are interested in. A handful of speeches even have interactive transcripts that allow users to search for a specific word or phrase which, when clicked on, causes the video to skip to that exact spot in the video - a useful feature for navigating hour-long speeches and roundtables.

Fora, which is backed by William R Hearst III, scion of the West Coast publishing family and a partner at Kleiner Perkins, has yet to receive its first round of VC funding. But it has struck content deals with a host of mostly non-profit institutions, including London’s Chatham House, the Council on Foreign Relations, and yes, C-SPAN.

Mr Gruber acknolwedges that Fora’s more serious programming isn’t the usual internet fare, or, as he describes it, "19 year-old girls running up a hill in wet t-shirts being tackled by guys who then go skateboarding." It is still early days, but Fora could well prove compelling for journalist, policymakers, academics and other public affairs geeks that inhabit the ‘long tail’ of internet users.

January 29th, 2007 in Digital media, Internet, Media | Permalink