Case Study: StarMedia Brings Santana to the Web

Creation of StarMedia Broadband

In the Spanish-speaking web portal world, StarMedia flat-out dominates. StarMedia recently reported 2.1 billion page views for the first quarter of 2000 and 3.3 million registered email users - approximately 46 percent of Latin American Internet users enter the Web through StarMedia.

Last September, StarMedia acquired San Francisco's Webcast Solutions and immediately renamed it StarMedia Broadband. Webcast Solutions was known for its work in international webcasting, having enabled streaming radio stations in Africa, installing a fully equipped webcast studio in India, and most recently producing a series of five all-day webcasts from Puerto Rico for StarMedia. Its new mission was to bring streaming media to StarMedia users.

Webcasting from Latin America

StarMedia Broadband now has Webcast Studios in San Francisco, New York, Mexico City and Sao Paulo, Brazil. It has also built proprietary mobile live webcasting rigs for Mexico, Brazil and Argentina and is preparing to place others in Chile, Venezuela, Colombia and Uruguay. A large rack contains three Dell PowerEdge 2450 encoders, a Cisco 2600 router and audio/video distribution. A smaller ATA road case holds a Mackie sound board, a Videonics MXPro digital video switcher and mounted Samsung Syncmaster 570P LCD video monitors. The systems are end-to-end digital using FireWire throughout.

Santana Sponsorship

Six months ago, StarMedia saw a surge in U.S.-based latino users coming to the site, despite the fact that it had little or no promotion in the U.S. market. Many U.S. latinos were trying to stay connected to their home countries and to watch local news. StarMedia began to look for ways to connect to and serve its growing U.S. audience and found the perfect match in May with sponsorship of Carlos Santana's "Supernatural" tour.

StarMedia's vice president of production, Jon Fox, explained the motivation from Santana's side. "Santana was just coming from winning 10 Grammies. Being a Mexican-American, having been born in Mexico, he really wanted to connect back to his roots and his culture. He was looking to diversify and find a broader audience for his message, not just in the United States, but throughout Latin America. He chose StarMedia as his conduit for that. It was a simpatico relationship."

Most "rock tour" sponsorships are about company branding with name placement in ads and concert backdrops. Santana's agreement with StarMedia went to a new level: StarMedia agreed to create an online presence for Santana and the tour, including large doses of streaming media.

Filling in the Site

The main streaming components of the site would be two full concerts and a live video chat with Santana, but the site was to go live with video content before the tour began. Greg Landau, a veteran Latin music producer and film director, had lobbied for and won access to Santana's family, band, pre-tour rehearsals and crew. He wanted to present Santana's past and present in context, with help from those closest to him.

StarMedia's Mexico office gathered footage from Tijuana, where Carlos was born. Landau took a small video crew out daily to the Mission District of San Francisco and to Santana's rehearsal space in Marin. The DV footage was edited by Ken Patterson at the San Francisco office in Final Cut Pro and handed off to the encoding department piece by piece for overnight encoding sessions with Media Cleaner Pro. In less than a week, the site went live with short (three to four minutes) video background pieces, including friends and family in Tijuana, a walking tour of The Mission with Carlos' brother Jorge, and an interview with the band's new singer, Andy Vargas.

The Concerts

Most of the decisions concerning the concert capture and encoding were determined by circumstances and necessity. Because the StarMedia audience was spread over so many time zones (the scope included Spain and Portugal), it was decided that the expense and logistical headaches involved in live webcasting were not worth the audience payoff. The two concerts chosen, at Jones Beach in New York and the World Amphitheater near Chicago, were early on in the tour and located in two of the major Latino markets, where StarMedia wanted to make a splash.

Although StarMedia was prepared to send out a video crew to shoot the concerts, the actual video capture proved to be the easiest piece of the puzzle. "Most of the large venues are already doing a two- or three-camera shoot for shows this size. They send it up to screens for the crowd," said production manager Bill Campbell. "In addition, Santana travels with his own videographer, Bob Higgens, who uses four static pro-sumer DV cameras on stage to project video behind the band." With a tape from the house crew, and separate DV tapes from the onstage cameras, StarMedia had more than enough footage for a final edit geared to the Web.

For Landau and Patterson, editing concert video for the Web means repressing years of training and instinct. Landau suggests holding each shot as long as possible and avoiding tricky transitions and pans. If the content is strong, as it was in the case of the Santana concerts, it will build its own level of excitement without flashy MTV-style editing.

Audio is Key

Although the video footage was built into the project, high audio quality was the key. StarMedia brought in the "state of the art" L7 mobile recording studio from effanel, built around an AMS-Neve Capricorn 24-bit digital board. The shows were recorded by Jim Gaines, Santana's longtime choice for major live sound events, and mastered at effanel's Chelsea studio in New York, where an identical setup was instantly programmed for the project using stored files from the mobile unit. The mastered audio was received in San Francisco two days after the concert.

Encoding Standards for Latin America

Internet connections in Latin America can be charitably described as sub-standard. Forecasters theorize that widespread broadband will come to Latin America sooner than the United States as satellites bypass the local phone systems and foreign companies make huge investments to upgrade ancient copper with the latest in fiber optics. But for now, a 56Kbps dialup connection can often see actual performance in the 20Kbps to 30Kbps range. While StarMedia prepares for the "Broadband Age," its goal is to make streaming media available to all of its users. While U.S. streaming companies sometimes agonize over whether to provide a stream for 28.8Kbps users, StarMedia assumes that it must always provide a streaming option for users connecting at 14Kbps. The company has become an expert in low bit-rate streaming.

For the Santana project, StarMedia decided to begin with an audio-only stream in Real SureStream format, from 8Kbps to 64Kbps stereo. Each song was encoded separately and streamed through sequenced SMIL -- providing a pulldown play list in the RealPlayer. This option gave low-bandwidth users a bottom line 8Kbps option and gave higher-speed users a chance to give full bandwidth to the audio.

Stepping up to video, StarMedia provided an intermediate SMIL presentation using the Real slideshow video encoding option in Media Cleaner Pro. After an initial Flash background is loaded, the slideshow streamed at 6Kbps while the audio was again SureStreamed from 8Kbps to 64Kbps. This allowed users with connections as low as 14Kbps to see and hear the full presentation.

For the full video presentation, StarMedia SureStreamed within Real guidelines at total audio and video bandwidths of 20Kbps, 34Kbps, 80Kbps, 150Kbps and 260Kbps, but stuck with a smallish 160 x 120 frame size -- again leaning toward the limitations of the users. Frame rates were also kept on the low side at 5fps and 10fps. A larger Flash background offered a song list with "skipping forward" functionality within the SMIL. The assumption was that most users would not watch the entire show at a sitting, but might return often to watch a few songs at a time.

Serving

Although StarMedia has Real servers co-located in San Jose, Calif., Mexico, Argentina and Brazil, it knew from the start that the Santana project would be too big for its network and started looking for its first serving partner. Jon Fox described the process: "We looked at everyone. We looked at Digital island, Akamai and RBN (Real Broadcast Network). After many meetings and testing through our in-country offices, we found that we were getting better response and better throughput from RBN," Fox said. "A lot of these third-party vendors are still building out in Latin America. A lot of them have presence in Europe and Southeast Asia, but Latin America is still sort of an untapped market for a lot of these providers."

"A lot of people don't know that most of the countries down there get their connectivity back into the States before the rest of the world. For instance, Argentina goes up to UUnet in Boston, and other providers have their access points in Miami, Houston or L.A.," said Fox. "What we found is that there really isn't a network access point, an interconnection point, between the countries in Latin America. Brazil is one place that RBN has built out some server facilities and was able to provide direct splitting for this content."

"We got really great support and service from RBN. Because they have multiple severs and there are so many access points from Latin America to the United States, we insisted they push all of our content out to their edge servers from the start. That really helps the first-time response throughput, as well as all the subsequent users. That was definitely a major selling point," said Fox.

A Tense Moment

On the day the New York concert was to go live, the entire project had one major hurdle to cross. Carlos Santana needed to watch the show and give final approval. It was hoped that Carlos could watch from a broadband location while on tour. Instead, he was going to view it on a laptop PC using a dial-up connection in a hotel room in Montreal. This produced hours of tense waiting in the San Francisco offices as the encoding staff mentally ran through answers to configuration and firewall issues. Finally Santana's office called to say that he loved it and the project went live on schedule.

Manolo Santana, webcast producer for the project (no relation to Carlos), has this advice for fledgling streaming media project managers: "Let your client know early all the limitations of streaming media. Make sure they know what is possible and give them examples of what it's going to look like." Because of Manolo's groundwork, Carlos knew what to expect and was not disappointed.

Video Chat

The Santana event was the group's biggest video chat to date and the first to max-out StarMedia's chat server. It went down for 45 seconds while the streaming went on without a hitch.

In the "Auditorio," StarMedia hosts 10 to 12 live chats with musicians, actors, writers and artists per week. Three to four a week include video streaming. The studio is set up for a two-camera shoot with JVC DV-500s and live digital video switching. Three dual-Pentium encoders provide users with choices from 6Kbps (audio only) through 260Kbps video at a 240 X 180 frame size. The streams are sent via a dedicated T1 to StarMedia's collocation cage in San Jose and split to the Latin American servers.

The Future

The Santana project has been a huge success for StarMedia, with over 200,000 unique visitors counted to date. In addition, StarMedia's Internet Zone, a huge tent full of satellite-connected computers that has been set up at every Santana concert, introduced thousands of U.S. Internet users to StarMedia. Looking to the future, they have done major promotion for Christina Aguilera's new Latin album and upcoming tour.