Real_Time_Congress_API / videos

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The videos collection currently holds videos from the U.S. House of Representatives and from the White House.

There are different fields available for White House Videos, Live White House Streams, and House video. These can be distinguished using the chamber field.

House of Representatives video

Filter the "chamber" field by "house" to retrieve videos from the House of Representatives.

HouseLive.gov provides full length videos of each legislative day. These videos can be extremely long, upwards of 14 hours sometimes. Each full length video has a video object in the RTC API.

For videos that have time offsets in their corresponding floor updates, we have artificially broken up the video into an array of clip objects. These clips each have an offset (in seconds), duration, array of events covered in that clip, and extracted names and identifiers.

Legislator and bill extraction

Each video document, as well as each clip within it, have had their text contents scanned for legislator names and bill codes. The "legislator_names", "bioguide_ids", and "bills" fields contain these values. When present on the top-level object, they contain all values found within any of the clips for that video. When present on a clip, they contain all values found within the events for that clip.

Raw text is only added to this "legislator_names" field, and subsequently converted into bioguide IDs, if it can be matched with a representative. If a legislator name is ambiguous and could match more than one legislator, bioguide IDs for each match are added. So, the API may have "false positives" in its bioguide IDs, but it should rarely miss anyone.

Guaranteed Fields

The only fields guaranteed for House videos are:

  • video_id
  • legislative_day
  • clip_id
  • chamber

Text Search Fields

If the "search" parameter is passed to the API, a case-insensitive pattern match of the given string is applied to the following fields:

  • clips.events

Fields

video_id
A unique id for this video in the api. It is constructed from the chamber name and the UTC timestamp on noon of the legislative day for this video
chamber
The chamber whose floor this video is from. Possible values: "house", "whitehouse".
pubdate
The published date of this video in the HouseLive.gov RSS feed
duration
The duration (in seconds) of this video
clip_id
A unique identifier for clips on the HouseLive.gov site
legislator_names
An array of strings where each string is the raw text of a legislator name that was parsed from at least once from the floor updates for this video.
bioguide_ids
An array of bioguide ids for all the legislators mentioned in the clip events of this video
bills
An array of bill ids for all the bills mentioned in the clip events of this video.
clip_urls
An object containing key value pairs for formats and URLs. Current keys include "mp4", "wmv", "mms", "mp3".
clips
An array of clip objects. The contents of each clip are defined below. #### clips
time
UTC timestamp marking the beginning of the clip.
duration
The duration (in seconds) of this clip.
events
An array of strings documenting what occurs in this clip.
offset
The offset (in seconds) from the beginning of the main video to the start of this clip.
legislator_names
An array of strings where each string is the raw text of a legislator name that was parsed from from the events for this clip. Raw text is only added to this array if it can be matched with a representative.
bioguide_ids
An array of bioguide IDs for all the legislators mentioned in the events of this clip.
bills
An array of bill IDs for all bills mentioned in the events of this clip.

White House videos

Filter the "chamber" field by "house" to retrieve videos from the House of Representatives.

White House video is parsed from WhiteHouse.gov. Most videos are available as "archived" videos, but some are available as "live" videos. Live videos tend to not have as many fields completed as archived videos but you can filter on the "status" field to get only live or archived videos.

Guaranteed Fields

The only fields guaranteed for house videos are

  • video_id
  • chamber
  • pubdate

Text Search Fields

If the "search" parameter is passed to the API, a case-insensitive pattern match of the given string is applied to the following fields:

  • title
  • description

Fields

video_id
A unique id for this video in the API. It is constructed from the chamber name and the slug on the White House site in the url for this video.
category
A string denoting the category to which the video belongs. These correspond to the eight different categorical RSS feeds found on the White House site. Values include "The First Lady", "Open for Questions", "Weekly Addresses", "Press Briefings", "Speeches", "Features", "West Wing Week", "Music and Arts at the White House"
pubdate
The UTC timestamp for when this video was published.
title
A string with the video title.
description
A string with the video description.
status
String denoting the status of video. Options are "live", "archived", and "upcoming".
chamber
The chamber whose floor this video is from. Possible values: "house", "whitehouse".
clip_urls
An object containing key value pairs for formats and URLs. Current keys include "mp4", "m4v". Note that despite the m4v extensions, these files do not have DRM and are public domain.

Examples

An example of an archived video from HouseLive.gov is below, followed by an example of all three kinds of White House videos (upcoming, live, and archived):