Nov 24, 2010 10:35 GMT  ·  By

The United States Army has launched a new video sharing website accessible only from behind its firewall to offer troops a more secure YouTube alternative.

Dubbed milTube, the new service is the latest addition to milSuite, a pack of Web 2.0 sharing and collaboration solutions created and used by the Department of Defense.

Since the website can only be accessed from within the Army's computer network, videos posted on it are protected from unauthorized viewing.

Military forces around the world are increasingly confronted with the problem of soldiers sharing restricted information on social media websites.

Videos previously uploaded by soldiers on YouTube depicted military excercises, weapons or senior officials, images that shouldn't be in the public domain.

"Video is an extremely powerful tool for storytelling and sharing information among personnel," said Justin Filler, deputy director of the MilTech Solutions Office, the Army organization in charge of milSuite.

"MilTube provides a secure, internal environment for those connections to take place across the Armed Services," he added.

Like YouTube, milTube allows videos to be organized with channels, categories and tags. Content can be easily searched, viewed and uploaded even from military bases with bandwidth restrictions.

The service is designed to determine a user's connection limits and adjust video quality accordingly. It also supports multiple formats and audio-only streams.

The Department of Defense plans to use the system to share training videos, ceremony recordings and news clips with the troops.

MilSuite currently has 88,500 users and in addition to milTube, it provides a wiki system (milWiki), a blog platform (milBlog) and a social networking site (milBook).

Access to all of the services is achieved via AKO (Army Knowledge Online) or DKO (Defense Knowledge Online) credentials.

Even though earlier this year the Army removed restrictions for several social media websites from its non-classified network (NIPRENET), YouTube was not one of them.

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