Flash Powers Comcast.net's Innovative Video Browser

Developing Production Processes
The video appearing in The Fan comes from a wide range of broadcast networks, including Fox Sports, CBS News, the Food Network, Major League Baseball, HGTV, and many others. Video clips encoded in Flash video format are provided to Comcast by the broadcasters. Video files go straight up to the VitalStream content delivery network, while metadata gets entered into the workflow via a Comcast installation of thePlatform.

According to Lauren Gala, video production manager at Comcast High Speed Internet, Comcast provided education and training to content providers new to encoding Flash video. "Providers needed an educational process to know how and why to do Flash video. Once they knew the advantages that The Fan brought, they thought the effort was totally worth it."

Some of those advantages were summarized by Tim Napolean, director of business development at VitalStream. "Flash and The Fan work the way people use the Web. There are no pop-up video windows, buffering is fast, and it works the same on the Mac as it does on Windows." VitalStream's network is one of the first to support Flash video on a large scale.

That scaling is proving to be important to Comcast. In the six months since the launch of The Fan on Thanksgiving weekend 2003, traffic to Comcast.net is up over 1600%. Detailed viewing statistics provided by VitalStream help guide the Comcast editorial team's content decisions as the site continues to grow.

The site's success brings new challenges to the Comcast team. Next steps include adding new "channels" to The Fan around news, sports, and other popular topics. The increased volume is leading the team to also work at automating more of the publishing workflow, allowing more scalability in the content acquisition and editorial process.

After seeing The Fan demo'd at StreamingMedia East, I've found myself going back to it time and again for its simplicity and elegance. The Fan at comcast.net reinforces Gala's assessment: "Seamless, easy to use, fun video doesn't have to be a hard-to-get-to experience for subscribers."