Yahoo! FinanceVision: Getting It Right the First Time
Yahoo! FinanceVision's ability to exceed viewer experience and quality expectations for live Web programming is by no means a happy coincidence. A great deal of time and planning (often under tight deadlines) went into to achieving the highest quality standards possible.
The Vision team was dedicated to getting it right the first time, wherever possible, by streamlining the production workflow, staffing requirements, equipment needs, and integration with existing Yahoo! tools and services.
In the Beginning: The Player
The popularity of Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo!'s non-streaming financial site, and the exponential growth in online investors made a strong case for launching FinanceVision as the first in a series of Vision products.
"By the time I got here, which was about a year and a couple months ago, there was the idea of a player and that there would be some kind of programming that would be produced for that player… as well as the fact that clearly we were targeting this product at people watching in their offices," notes executive producer Eric Scholl.
The FinanceVision Player, consisting of Web frames with ActiveX controls, was the group's answer to the challenge of creating a familiar, TV-like experience with existing Web technology. "Here [on the Web], there's this open canvas of what it looks like and what makes people watch. It's a whole different experience," adds senior producer Jon Orlin.
Derek Dukes, senior producer for Yahoo!'s Vision products, was responsible for the player's form factor and worked extensively with Yahoo!'s graphical user interface (GUI) department to determine the layout.
While reviewing traditional financial broadcasts, it became clear to Dukes that a new strategy was in order for the Web, one that would clearly benefit the audience. Dukes explains, "The rest of the form factor evolved from the basic functionality of showing a video, pushing out events, and then making the interactive experience happen." Dukes' team followed suit by building a proprietary tool to synchronize information — related to the programming — into a separate window. Selecting and pushing appropriate content on command into this "data window," as it came to be known, is the responsibility of the Data Wrangler.
The implementation of the data window adjoining the video window immediately provided a venue for adding interactivity and expanding the available data offering while maintaining realistic expectations of the 288-by-216-pixel video screen. "If we wanted to, we could do box graphics of the stories and put a little box on the [video] screen, but we're already in a little box," says Orlin.
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