Year: 2009
This year, the RealEyes crew is toasting the Holidays Mad Men style. We wish our
clients and friends the very happiest of Holidays – we’ll see you all in 2010!
The Vermont Country Store has stocked hard-to-find apparel, personal care, food, candy and country home products since 1945. After a successful project re-engineering the store’s online checkout process, The Vermont Country Store engaged RealEyes Media to build one of the very first Facebook storefront applications.
The resulting application allows Facebook users to shop for select Vermont Country Store products without leaving the Facebook web application. The retailer can provide previews of products, special deals, or highlight inventory specials just to its Facebook fans and users, giving them additional incentive to interact with Vermont Country Store.
The application launched today!
Be one of the first to shop The Vermont Country Store on Facebook!
More than 40,000 students use A Beka Academy’s home school curriculum each year. This stalwart of distance learning for primary and secondary education has traditionally delivered its video-based instruction to students using physical media, a costly and time consuming process.
A Beka Academy engaged RealEyes Media to create a digital process to augment their traditional delivery model. The resulting project used the spectrum of Adobe tools to yield both an automated process to encode, encrypt, and transfer more than 14,000 hours of video to a CDN as well as a consumer application that students will use to view assigned classroom video content.
The automated encoding process was designed to empower A Beka Academy to process and deploy new video content without dependence on an external vendor.
The consumer application’s purpose is to allow for secure, on-demand access of high-quality video lessons to each student while strictly enforcing business rules and safeguarding intellectual property. Two versions of the consumer application were created to meet the school’s needs fully. A Flash, browser-based version allows students to view assigned streaming video lessons by day or by subject. The AIR desktop version extends these capabilities, allowing students to download DRM-protected files for offline viewing.
Challenge
In addition to providing a convenient, new delivery option for families using A Beka Academy curriculum, and realizing considerable ROI over time, the school undertook this project to meet the challenge of adequately enforcing its business rules. For example, the consumer application implements complex view rules based upon an individual student’s academic program, and enrollment status. This was not possible with the physical media delivery model. Furthermore, the school desired to enact more stringent control over its intellectual property to reduce or eliminate unauthorized use. DRM protection and SWF validation met this need.
This project also addressed other significant development challenges. These include:
- Thousands of hours of source video content needed to be captured from original physical media, encoded into H.264 format, secured with DRM protection, and deployed to a CDN.
- Families using the school’s curriculum are geographically diverse, with extreme variances in connection speeds, hardware performance, and technical knowledge.
- Instant access to streaming files was desired; however, it was also critical that students have the ability to view lessons when an internet connection was not available. Also, the ability to send the entire library of lessons via fixed media was desired to accommodate remote A Beka Academy schools.
Benefits
The school’s physical media delivery model required that three shipments of DVDs were sent to each student, and then returned to the school. There is considerable financial cost to this process including shipping, media, processing, and replacement of lost/damaged disks.
Providing these files as h.264 Flash Video files for streaming and DRM-protected download access via a CDN is significantly less expensive per-student than the traditional physical delivery model. Additionally, as more students adopt this digital delivery method, there is an economy of scale as origin storage costs are distributed among a larger student base.
David Hassoun and Jun Heider of the RealEyes team will be presenting at MAX 2009 October 4–7 in Los Angeles, California. David will be presenting on Video in the Enterprise and Jun Heider’s topic will be Tackling Memory and Performance in Flash, Flex, and Adobe AIR.
Be sure to sign up and check out David and Jun’s sessions. Register here for what promises to be an amazing event!
Video in the Enterprise – David Hassoun
Learn how you can deploy video in Flash within your enterprise. This session will walk you through how you can support employee generated video, control access with LDAP and how to install, configure and customize the Adobe Flash Media Server within your network. The lab will focus on the specific challenges faced within large enterprises and implementing user authentication techniques using server side ActionScript. Step through the processes to deploy and discover the benefits of edge caching and other deployment techniques for high volume streaming using Flash Media Server within your network to publish live and recorded media.
Tackling Memory and Performance in Flash, Flex, and Adobe AIR – Jun Heider
Learn everything you need to know about managing memory during the lifetime of your application. We’ll address how objects are created and deleted, how the garbage collector works, and how to debug your applications to find any leaks. We’ll also cover how you can monitor the memory and performance of your application using the Flash Builder 4 Profiler. You’ll walk away with code in hand that provides solutions to common problems likely to be encountered when creating a wide range of applications.
RealEyes Media has been working at fever-pitch for the last few months to bring you the most Flash-tastic event in Denver’s history: Rocky Mountain Adobe Camp. And, of course, our crew will be there (alongside other premiere designers and developers) to present sessions on how you can best use Adobe’s web technology in your career. We invite you to join us in Downtown Denver on June 22, 2009 for the first ever Adobe Camp!
Here are the sessions that our team is presenting:
- Building Flash Video Players: Progressive and Streaming (David Hassoun)
- Enterprise Encoding and Encrypting (Jun Heider & David Hassoun)
- Building Your First Flex/AIR Application with Flex 4 (Jun Heider)
- Building Custom Connect Pods in Flash with Sync SWF (Nils Thingvall)
- Creating Courses and Curricula in Adobe Connect Pro (Jorma Jennings)
And, while we’re giving props to our team, we want to thank the Adobe Camp planning duo: Amanda Johnson and Josh Lucero. Make sure to meet them at the camp as well – they are making sure it will be a great day!
RealEyes Media’s Jun Heider will be speaking at 360|Flex (May 18-20 in Indianapolis) on Flex Application Profiling by Example. Expect a session light on slides and heavy on demonstration, in typical Jun style.
The session will start with a brief explanation of the concepts that will be discussed and then kick into high gear with demonstrations and live profiling with the Flex Builder Profiler. During the session the features of the Flex Builder Profiler will be illustrated and light will be shed on how to analyze the data collected by the Profiler. The goal of this session will be to arm the attendee with the ability to use the Flex Builder Profiler to help increase the responsiveness and decrease the memory consumed by their applications.
Hope to see you there!
RealEyes Media is excited to sponsor and plan the very first ever Adobe Camp event! In fact, you can get an early jump on registration and head over to the Rocky Mountain Adobe Camp website to learn more and register!
Rocky Mountain Adobe Camp is a one-day, three-track event focusing on the power of of Adobe’s Flash Platform across digital disciplines such as application development, media production, and eLearning. With a diverse group of industry-leading speakers from Adobe, Digital Primates, RealEyes Media (just to name a few) there will be in-depth presentations and unique hands-on activities for everyone from newbies to gurus.
Check it out, and if you’re in Denver, we hope to see you at Rocky Mountain Adobe Camp on June 22nd.
Live DVR is the process of recording or “caching” a live video stream on the server and then enabling viewer access to the live or recorded stream content as it streams. A unique opportunity for this approach is making the video-on-demand (VOD) content available quickly following the live event without the time-consuming requirement of sending, encoding, and uploading it. The recorded content can simply be made available as VOD content.
David Hassoun has published a new article detailing how to implement a live DVR player on Adobe’s Developer Center. Check it out to learn how to take advantage of this new Flash Media Server feature.
After reading the article, you should have a solid grasp of how to enable a live DVR stream and how you can begin offering new engaging experiences to your customers. Part 2 shows you how to implement the new DVRCast server-side sample application from Adobe, as well as stream and record content with Flash Media Live Encoder 3 and play back the live DVR content with the FLVPlayback 2.5 component.
Beatport is the recognized leader in electronic dance music downloads for DJs and club music enthusiasts. As much of the company’s success relies upon a customer’s ability to successfully navigate the Beatport.com website to preview and purchase tracks, Beatport’s decision to rebuild their Flash Platform website from the ground up was a significant one.
Although the site was highly successful, it was not as scalable and extendable as was required to incorporate the leading edge features Beatport desired for the 3.0 release of its site including:
- My Beatport, a robust user preference system for tracking musical tastes and favorites throughout the site
- Enhanced Playlists that allow users to queue albums and tracks for preview without interrupting browsing
- Sophisticated Menu Docking, akin to a desktop application makes full use of the visitor’s screen real estate
- Keyboard Navigation Support, allowing advanced users to navigate the site and player controls quickly
- Multi-Lingual Support to allow a full browsing experience for Beatport’s global community
- Personalized Offers, integrating features such as “users also bought” and other associations
- History Management, including full support for browser forward and back buttons
- Deep Linking that created a unique URL for all application views to restore state and included content
Beatport already had success working with RealEyes to develop the groundbreaking AIR application Beatport Downloader. RealEyes was then tasked with leading Beatport’s own internal development team in rebuilding all aspects of the current website, engineering a sophisticated new feature set, and architecting a scalable ActionScript 3.0 Flex application framework.
Challenge
To make the redevelopment effort a cost-effective one for Beatport, RealEyes leveraged two existing resources heavily during this project: existing data services and the internal Beatport development staff. The integration of both created some significant project challenges, while allowing for powerful synergies between the RealEyes and Beatport teams.
The existing data services were in a variety of formats and were constructed to facilitate the functionality of Beatport’s existing web application. RealEyes was able to use these existing services, regardless of XML, JSON, RDF, or RSS format, by using data translators to construct the appropriate Flex objects for Beatport’s new web application. While additional Flex development time was required, this decision represented a significant savings in time and budget when compared with constructing services customized for the new application. Further, should Beatport desire to optimize or change the data services in the future, the application allows for inversion of control, meaning that it is possible for Beatport to change data service properties without recompiling the Flex application itself.
One of the larger challenges of the development process was fully integrating RealEyes’ and Beatport’s internal developers and managers into a cohesive project team. Several processes including Agile project management, continuous integration, peer review, unit testing, and source control were implemented at the start of the project to facilitate open, yet streamlined collaboration. Further, RealEyes worked with the Beatport team to provide custom training and one-on-one developer mentoring.
Benefits
Beatport’s 3.0 website redevelopment project was a highly successful endeavor, benefiting the company’s community of music enthusiasts, while yielding substantial business gains.
Functional updates in the 3.0 release were targeted at making the web experience easier to navigate while providing additional levels of application personalization. User analytic data as well as testimonial feedback show new features such as the sophisticated menu docking system, robust user preference caching in My Beatport, and keyboard navigation enhanced user satisfaction levels as the site now conforms better to the target audience’s hardware and workflow choices. This increase in user experience resulted in tangible business benefits including higher user retention and additional store purchase revenue.
The 3.0 Beatport website is well equipped to change with the company’s evolving business objectives. Without recompiling, Beatport can modify how dynamic data is brought into the application. As Beatport’s own technical staff was an integral part of the development team, maintaining and extending the application after the initial launch was a seamless transition. Further, the use of industry best practices – such as a Cairngorm-based ActionScript 3.0 Flex framework – not only eases the ramp-up time for new developers, but makes the final application more stable, extensible, and scalable.
The process of dynamic streaming has been updated, and greatly enhanced, in Flash Media Server (FMS) 3.5. RealEyes Media’s David Hassoun has created a three-part tutorial series for implementing this powerful streaming technology so that you can deliver the best quality video experiences possible using Adobe’s Flash Player.
Part 1: Overview of the new capabilities
Part 2: ActionScript 3.0 dynamic stream API
Part 3: Integrating dynamic streaming with existing video players
About Dynamic Streaming
Dynamic streaming is the process of efficiently delivering streaming video to users by dynamically switching among different streams of varying quality and size during playback. This provides users with the best possible viewing experience their bandwidth and local computer hardware (CPU) can support. Another major goal of dynamic streaming is to make this process smooth and seamless to users, so that if up-scaling or down-scaling the quality of the stream is necessary, it is a smooth and nearly unnoticeable switch without disrupting the continuous playback.
David’s article series provides an overview of the enhanced capabilities and concepts of dynamic streaming with Adobe Flash Player 10 and Adobe AIR 1.5 with the new Adobe Flash Media Server 3.5 (using either Flash Media Streaming Server 3.5 or Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5). Although dynamic streaming was somewhat possible in previous versions of Flash Player and Flash Media Server, the process was very complicated to implement from a developer’s perspective and the end result was not a smooth user experience.
Want to implement dynamic streaming using FMS 3.0? Check out David’s original dynamic stream switching article.
