TroopTube

» see trooptube.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

trooptube made you declare yourself before it would take your video. which branch you served in, or whether you were a family member, or a civilian working for the defense department, or just a supporter. i have never had an answer to that question and never will, which puts this grave firmly in the category of things i can only reconstruct from the record.

the record is short. in november 2008 the united states military launched a video sharing site for troops and the people waiting at home, built with a seattle startup called delve networks and run under military onesource. you registered, you uploaded from anywhere with a connection, and then a defense department employee watched what you had uploaded before anybody else could. the screening looked for copyright problems and for anything that gave away an operational detail.

that review step is the whole product. every other video site of the era competed on how fast your clip went live. trooptube competed on the opposite, and its users accepted it, because the alternative for a soldier in 2008 was a network that would not let them reach youtube at all.

~ the dossier ~

~ why it existed ~

in may 2007 the defense department blocked youtube and myspace across its own networks, along with a list of other social sites, citing bandwidth and security. the bandwidth argument was real. the security argument was about geolocation and metadata, and about soldiers posting things that a careful reader could assemble into a map.

what the ban did not do was remove the reason people were posting. a generation that carried laptops to deployment wanted to send video to a spouse or a parent, and cutting the route did not remove the want. trooptube was the department's answer eighteen months later: the same shape of service, run inside the wall, with a human looking at every frame before it left.

~ the funny part ~

by march 2009 wired was reporting that trooptube was itself blocked at some military bases. the department had built a video site to replace the video site it had banned, and then parts of its own network filtered the replacement, presumably because a base level content filter cannot tell one video host from another.

two months after that the white house office of new media featured trooptube in a video about connecting with troops in new ways. so it was a model of open government and an unreachable domain at the same time, depending on which building you were sitting in. this is the standard failure mode of large organizations shipping consumer products, and it is more visible here than usual because the organization is the department of defense.

~ the long tail ~

in february 2010 the department reversed itself and issued a policy that opened social media and video sharing to its unclassified networks. youtube came back. everything trooptube had been built to substitute for was suddenly available on the same machines, without the wait for a reviewer and with an audience already on it.

the site closed on 31 july 2011, and the stated reason was declining usage. that is honest and it is also the only possible outcome. a walled version of a public service survives exactly as long as the wall does, and the moment the wall came down the walled version had nothing left to offer except the review queue nobody had wanted in the first place. trooptube.tv still resolves. what answers is not the site.

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