Switched has a new home! Huffpost Tech.

Click here to visit the new home of Switched!

Hot on HuffPost Tech:

See More Stories
AOL Tech

Military Launches TroopTube, a YouTube Substitute For Soliders

by Dan Reilly on November 12, 2008 at 09:05 PM

After being banned from accessing sites such as YouTube and MySpace in 2007, the men and women protecting our nation will be able to view viral videos like everyone else, albeit in a watered down version. Delve Networks, a Seattle video publishing company, helped the military launch TroopTube, where members of the armed forces, their families, Defense Department employees, and supporters can upload and view streaming videos.

While it doesn't sound like anything special, Delve's contribution is quite innovative. The company helped in sorting and approving submitted videos, which are screened by the Pentagon for taste, copyright infringement, and security issues. Then, each video is copied into several different sizes, allowing the server to automatically play the one most appropriate for the viewer's connection speed. Most impressive is the search engine. The audio for each clip is converted into a text transcript, which is then compared against what USA Today calls a "massive database of words commonly uttered in proximity to each other, collected from crawling hundreds of millions of Web pages."

The original ban on the sites went into place due to security and bandwidth concerns, but since many soldiers now have laptops, TroopTube is seen as a "retention tool" to keep them entertained and happy. Currently, the featured videos on the site are generally messages to the troops, including one from General David Petraeus, so we're not sure how far the taste requirements go. We sincerely hope they're not denying soldiers the "kick to the groin" genre of videos. Doesn't everyone enjoy those? [From: USA Today]

Tags: military, trooptube, video, web

HuffPost AOL Social News Most Popular