Streaming Media for Motorheads

"Each Web site has its own unique audience and traffic," he says. "And we are able to manage them in such an efficient way that the benefit of the traffic outweighs the cost and trouble to manage the Web sites."
From these sites last year Autobytel served 5 million user-initiated informational videos and 8 million sponsored video commercials, which represents a total viewing time of about 370,000 hours. Like TV ads, these Web-delivered video ads are typically 30 seconds or a minute, while the informational videos are typically about four minutes, according to James Fabin, Autobytel's manager of Web and video production. The total amount of time spent on Autobytel Web sites is higher than can be explained by individual hits because, "a lot of consumers watch videos over and over," says Fabin. "The ability to rewind is very, very important to our audience, and that's one of the reasons we're Flash-based, so you can rewind nearly instantaneously; you don't have to reconnect to a Windows streaming server and wait for that long delay."

Originally, Autobytel's the video player incorporated into Autobytel sites supported Real, QuickTime, and Windows Media, but "it really didn't support our needs or our users' needs," says Rosenberg. "It didn't allow users to rewind or fast-forward, and it didn't allow us to insert ads, which is the primary way we monetize the video product. So James and his team built a Flash-based player which is much faster and allows you to fast-forward and rewind, and we also built our own dynamic ad insertion tool that allows us to put what are basically television ads at the beginning or the middle or end of the videos."

Autobytel's proprietary Web technology can even detect what the consumer is viewing and change ad insertion to adapt to that content. For example, if the user has accessed a video describing the features of the Lexus, the system will insert a Lexus commercial that the visitor to the site can elect to watch. It will also provide the visitor with other Lexus-related options—links to Lexus specs and more in-depth information, and, of course, a link to www.lexus.com, as well as to a local dealership for an immediate buy.

Autobytel has put a lot of effort into the development of its player, which they claim delivers ""near broadcast quality." They continue to tweak it, and are obviously proud of it. "When our new player comes out in March, we'll be way ahead of the competition again," says Rosenberg. "When you see the quality, your jaw will drop," adds Fabin.

Autobytel has firmly committed itself to the Flash format. "Since we're Flash-based, we only need two copies of every file -- a high quality (280K/sec) and a low quality for the different bit rates," says Fabin, adding that they also use a "binary speed test" to test the user's connection speed, which can be changed at any time. Finalizing on Flash like this "actually saves a lot of bandwidth, resources, and hosting space, because we don't need to worry about hosting Real, Windows, and QuickTime," says Fabin. He says one of his favorite Flash tools is Flix, which is Flash video encoding software formerly from Wildform, Inc., but now available from On2 Technologies.