Case Study: Automatic Stream Insertion
Faced with the daunting task of having to deliver millions of video streams per day and insert them inside the ad spaces of thousands of Web pages in a user-friendly and compelling way, what would you do? (Sorry, panic is not an option.) One solution is to do what Henry Ford did: automate.
That was the solution Chris Mancini, creative manager for the Yahoo! Streaming Center, chose. Thanks to Macromedia Flash, a tool well-suited to automation, Mancini was able to create a video-stream ad insertion platform now known as Yahoo! AdVision. Essentially, it automates the process of getting video streams into the ad spaces of Web pages.
Every day, Mancini and his staff must prepare and deliver streams of corporate videos and commercials, but their highest-volume chore is streaming movie trailers. Yahoo! has contracts with most major movie companies, so when a studio gears up with a media blitz ad campaign to promote an upcoming movie premiere, there’s lots and lots of work for the Yahoo! Streaming Center.
You can imagine perhaps that an operation the size of Yahoo! might have a few streams to get out per day. Mancini is responsible not just for yahoo.com and all its subsets (movies.yahoo.com, mail.yahoo.com, etc.) but for all the company’s various properties, from media and entertainment to business and finance. Then there’s all the overseas versions of Yahoo!—such as Yahoo! Japan, Yahoo! Europe, and so on. Yahoo!’s international scope further adds to the workload, requiring multiple streams with multiple languages. As if that weren’t enough, add the requirement that all the streams be available in different bitrates (56Kbps, 100Kbps, 300Kbps, and 700Kbps).
To improve this situation, Mancini and crew devised a way to use Flash and the Flash Component Architecture to create a custom Flash Component (AdVision) that automatically populates Web-based Flash ad units with video streams. The Flash authoring environment is a natural one for doing such things. It was designed from the ground up as a sort of object-oriented tool that allows authors to create reusable "components."
In creating their custom component, the Yahoo! staff first created their own custom video player that runs within the Flash player. (One should think of a Flash file as a "container," rather than a format or codec, says Chris Hock, director of product marketing for Macromedia.) This Yahoo! custom player features its own unique user interface, controls, and client logic. It uses XML to pull video content automatically into Flash ad units, Hock explains.