Back to YouTube

There's been a lot of controversy about President Obama's upcoming back-to-school speech to schoolchildren. Despite Obama's non-partisan message, a number of parents are threatening to keep their kids home and conservative school districts are refusing to air the segment in class, based on the argument that children would be a captive audience for possible political indoctrination.

Of course, what I find most interesting is how the actual broadcast will be managed, given the White House's preference for YouTube and the fact that many schools block the popular video-sharing site from school computers. That many classrooms would represent a significant amount of bandwidth for an administration that tends to outsource its webcasting to external servers.

Apparently Obama plans to use the White House Live feature to handle streaming with CNN as its broadcast partner. Now that schools can no longer pull signals out of the air, I'm not sure how many have access to cable television. And the program still only allows commenting through Facebook, a website that almost all schools block.

The promo for the event is on -- what else -- YouTube.



Update: Check out Dennis Jerz's reading of the speech for new media references here.