Just earlier this year at Spring Conference, we got a confused email from a member trying to follow conference who didn’t understand feeds in the internet sense, and thought Lib Dem Voice was offering live video coverage of the conf. That, regrettably, is a little beyond our budget and capabilities – although I hope you agree with me that our team in Bourmemouth is producing first rate content in a variety of interesting ways.
It wasn’t possible to follow Spring Conference from home at all. If I remember rightly, it wasn’t broadcast on BBC Parliament and there was little if any radio coverage. An indication, probably of the relative lack of importance of the spring conferences to the media, and a reflection there is much less of a conference season in the early months of the year.
But we really are suffering an embarrassment of riches here in Bournemouth. There’s the excellent service we are offering from LDV, but we are in direct competition with a number of the big boys offering similar levels of service. Of course, there’s BBC Parliament – very helpfully broadcasting the conference platform live, and then repeating it after hours for those who were at work. Then, because it’s been available on BBC Parliament, the same sessions are also available on BBC iPlayer – although those monster 3-hour programmes are not terribly navigable.
And that is not all. The BBC helpfully slice up segments of speeches and add them into the coverage of individual stories – as you can see in this coverage of Chris Huhne’s speech. Telegraph TV has been covering the vanishingly small bits of conference that they think will be of interest to their audience – mostly Vince Cable, it seems – but their search engine and my browser are not playing together very well at the moment and I can’t find it. The Guardian have a multimedia presence, which you can find here.
Interestingly, it seems Sky News are not covering us at all. Presumably there wasn’t much interest in reporting all the news quicker and less accurately than Auntie. A google search of “sky news lib dem conference” returned, erm, Lib Dem Voice, and using the search engine on Sky News itself just brought up a link to news from a long-forgotten Blackpool conference.
Well done, media chaps, it’s nice to see you take us seriously. Now all you have to do is do it in the spring, too.



2 Comments
It would be great if LDV could bring us live video from the conference fringe and other events, using Ustream, Mogulus, or whatever. I think the problem though is that upload speeds are completely useless in general. But sooner or later this will happen I hope.
I also discovered last night that it’s all on the BBC iPlayer. Our cup runneth over.