Meet Philly in Focus, the Philadelphia community media hub created as part of Comcast‘s Project Open Voice pilot, which launched in public beta last week following remarks by Mayor Nutter and his wife Lisa.
Philly in Focus is an online open access, interactive media portal for Philadelphia content producers at all levels, young and old, individual and organizational. The media hub is one of six pilots being launched by Comcast, as part of its national initiative Project Open Voice. The three-year program is part of an agreement Comcast made with the FCC when it acquired NBC early last year.
The site is not meant to have the scale of a Youtube or Vimeo, but instead offer local eyeballs to video content produced for Philadelphians. Or at least that’s what Comcast told the FCC they’d do.
With the public access television network PhillyCAM‘s studio at 7th and Ranstead as a backdrop, both Nutters addressed a crowd of about 50 from the press corps, Comcast, and the Philadelphia community. Mayor Nutter discussed the relevance of this new community media hub to enhancing education, business, and digital access, as well as the city’s other social media efforts, such as Change by Us Philly web tool.
The Mayor said Philly In Focus would be a valuable addition to the city’s social media outreach, which was recently recognized as the country’s 7th most social media savvy city government.
“It’s what the Continental Congress would have used had this tool been available. They would have gotten the information out much quicker all across the United States if Philly in Focus had been around at that time,” the Mayor said, then acknowledged the comment was not in his notes.
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