TheRealTimeWeb.com - Site Check

Why MLB.com Ditched Silverlight

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 00:13:00 +0100

I know I know, I really should not feel as much Schadenfreude as I do over this topic but it's just too good to miss (and hey, any chance of something like this happening to Adobe and I'm sure the dark side would be all over it ;-)

Some may argue that this is not a big deal - you win some, you lose some - but MLB.com is no small fry. Cnet describes it as 'the Web's most successful subscription service' serving half a million (!) subscribers.
What went on behind the scenes is now starting to emerge as - according to Cnet - Microsoft points the finger at 'a series of glitches and conflicts between the companies'. Moreover, the lawyers are now apparently involved which sounds like a major fallout to me. MLBAM's CEO is even heard talking about an 'ongoing dispute with Microsoft'. Oh dear. Can it be worse than Adobe and Apple banging heads over Flash on the iPhone? Maybe.

I guess we'll have to see how things progress for Silverlight, but I still fail to see the real advantage of the platform, at least from a user's point of view. Sure, it must be great being a .NET developer now being able to hack away at a new platform, using new (and existing) tools, but what problem is this plugin really trying to solve? What does it offer that Flash hasn't been doing for years? I'm a developer myself and naturally curious, but so far I have had next to no urge to even install the Silverlight development tools (which ideally require you to run Windows as you desktop OS).

I know I keep asking this, but where are the impressive Silverlight apps built by the Silverlight community, I mean those that did not make the showcase pages (yes, we;ve seen the Olympics now. And Netflix. Next?), and why does it seem that all the existing showcases are built around a video experience? It's not all about video you know!?
Let's revisit this topic in a year. What do you think the RIA playing field will look like then?

UK Viewers: Watch Inauguration Day Coverage Live on BanterTV.com

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 16:10:00 +0100

A few months ago I put together a website called BanterTV.com. BanterTV.com aggregates the BBC iPlayer Live streams and adds a chat interface to each 'channel'.

As today is Inauguration Day for president Obama it may be appropriate to announce my little project here and invite UK viewers (iPlayer streams are UK only) to join me on BBC 1 where Huw Edwards and Matt Frei present live coverage from Washington DC as Barack Obama is sworn in as 44th President of the United States and addresses the nation.

Watch the event live on BanterTV.com. Hope to see you there. Coverage in the UK starts at 4pm GMT.

HD on the Web: A Promise They Cannot Keep

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:41:00 +0100

It's official: HD on the web is broken. And guess what: it doesn't matter which technology (Flash/Silverlight) you use, neither seems to deliver on its promises.

Take this post with a pinch of salt because it's only my own perspective, but I would say I'm in a fairly good position to report on the playback experiences I have had. My setup is slightly above average with a new 24" iMac, 4GB of RAM and a fast connection. Right now it measured 4.5Mbit/s which I consider fast enough for any HD content, especially if it uses smooth streaming, adaptive streaming, multi-bitrate streaming or whatever else the latest buzzword is.

SmoothHD is the name of Microsoft's latest showcase site and a (marketingbull alarm) 'cutting edge new technology from Microsoft and Akamai that will raise the bar on the consumer video experience'. Yeah, except that it doesn't. My experience is one of dropped frames, rebuffering and stuttering audio. It just about passes as an average online video experience - it would certainly give you a headache if you were trying to watch a feature length movie or sporting event.
The image on the left shows part of one of the clips - yeah it may have been blown up to what some may call HD resolution, but it certainly did not look like it was filmed in HD. It looks blurry and washed out. Other clips looked better in image quality but they instead kept frame freezing about once every 30 seconds or playing catchup with the audio. Sometimes I heard 5 seconds worth of audio without the picture moving at all. Guess I better dust the old VHS off, at least that played consistently bad.
It got worse once I entered full screen mode: all playback controls were taken away from me (wtf?) and the jerky-jumpy playback got even worse. My CPU was not impressed - check the picture and have a wild guess at which point I entered full screen mode...

The Coral Reef clip was especially bad and it stuttered nonstop. It seemed as if IIS7 was trying to measure my bandwidth, got it wrong and then didn't send enough data for my machine to consume. Whatever the cause, it wasn't adaptive at all.
Oh and one more thing: a 'cutting edge experience' should allow a user to click the timeline to seek to a point and not make the scrubber jump around like it's on steroids without actually scrubbing anywhere. A 4x4 pixels hit area on the scrubber is also not the most usable. Lots of lessons to learn when you let .NET devs build a UI ;-)

Flash to the rescue. Nice thought but sorry to disappoint, the experience there is just about as bad. StreamFlashHD is the site where Adobe showcases its latest Dynamic Streaming technology. It's a similar setup to Microsoft's showcase and promises to deliver an uninterrupted HD video experience. Problem with that is that a user is put through a similar stutter-til-the-lights-go-out ordeal as with the SmoothHD site. Many of the clips rebuffered for me time and time again and I was anxiously waiting for the dynamic part of the streaming to kick in. It never did.
In all fairness there were a few things that went a bit better: the fullscreen mode allowed me to still access the playback controls, the CPU wasn't maxed out (far from it) and the overall video quality seemed better. That's my subjective view. On the downside, some clips weren't even deinterlaced. Gimme a break. This is Adobe putting up a showcase for HD video on the web and they use interlaced video? I rest my case.

If nothing else then remember this: if you want a good video experience you need an even better audio experience first. You simply cannot get away with choppy audio. No matter how great your resolution, it is useless frames freeze for what seems like an eternity. HD on the web gets a big fat fail from me.
But guess what, it doesn't actually matter. 99% of users do NOT care about HD (at least not in front of their computer, different story on the TV I suppose). They just want to watch video, and watch it smoothly. Give me standard definition any time, as long as it looks ok and I can hear the sound. If users really cared about resolution then YouTube would be a deserted island.
The bottom line for me: HD on the web is not even needed (yet). The problem these companies are trying to fix isn't one. Who is actually asking them for it, I doubt that it's the consumers.
Microsoft: keep the Smooth, drop the HD, and give your engineers some lessons in UI design. Adobe: give me streaming any day, but I don't think I need it to be dynamic if that makes it worse than before you 'fixed' it. Neither one of those showcase sites lived up to its promises, and that's a big disappointment. Yes, experience matters indeed, not resolution.

Mapping Information

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 22:35:00 +0100

And I do not mean information on maps... No. Britain From Above is probably the best program on UK television at the moment - in my opinion anyway. When I first watched it I didn't quite know what to expect, I guess I thought it would be someone shooting video out of a plane for an hour. How wrong I was.

Each episode of this series focuses on a particular topic such as the UK transport network, abandoned industries or the transformation of London over the years. One really innovative piece which I found especially interesting was the visual mapping of information over a map of Britain or London. This involved visualising data such as landline telephone calls in all major UK cities, GPS data traces from taxis across London or the air traffic movements over the UK.

Unfortunately - once again - the videos on the Britain From Above website are GEOIP locked to UK viewers, but I would encourage you to find the footage elsewhere (but only if you are a license payer of course!).

Footnote: The ~~BBC~~ author of this website is not responsible for the content of external internet sites. (In all seriousness though, why does the BBC block non-UK viewers even for the small 2 minute clips on their site, yet then uploads that same material to YouTube? Yes, the BBC uploads it.)

Control a Submarine via Flash and FMS

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 12:11:00 +0100

And now for something completely different. Have you ever thought about riding a submarine? Or how about simply controlling it, RC style? Well now you can and you can do it in style via Flash and FMS.

On Fosters.co.uk riders can control a marine ROV (remotely operated vehicle) which is more commonly used for commercial exploratory underwater operations. The ROV is in a 100,000 litre (roughly 26,000 US gallon) tank at the National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth.

The whole system is built almost entirely using Adobe products. Flash Media Interactive Server sits at the centre of the set up. In addition to serving the video streams that are broadcast from Flash Media Encoder, FMIS carries messages back and forth between the clients and our on-location software. The on-location software is an AIR application which handles queuing and translates the riders' actions into commands that are being send directly to the submarine through a serial connection.

This must be the most widely accessible use of ROV technology to date!

About the creators: JustAddTonic are a digital agency that specialise in emerging and non traditional interactive media. They were contacted by Play, to create a website that allows users to 'ride' a submarine in real time and you can see the result here (registration required - but worth it).

Behind the Scenes of Justin.tv

Fri, 03 Aug 2007 16:35:00 +0100

You know Justin, don't you? The guy who's broadcasting himself 24/7 with a camera strapped to his head. His site justin.tv has recently started a transformation into a live broadcasting platform for people like you and me but is for now limited to a selected set of broadcasters with the intention of opening it up to a broader audience - reminds me a bit of ustream.tv.

Having blogged about justin.tv once before I received an email from Kyle Vogt, the main technical brain behind the operations at justin.tv. Kyle was kind enough to lend me a few minutes of his time for a short interview which I'll try to summarize now.

What's obvious right away when looking at justin.tv is the fact that the video feeds are delivered in Flash. That's significant when you realize that the site has been around for a fair few months, going back to early 2007 when very few people were attempting to stream live Flash video on a large scale. There were very few CDNs that supported live Flash video - in fact at the time when justin.tv went on air there was only VitalStream - so the choices for justin and his team were limited. And VitalStream they chose - with mixed results. In a nutshell, it didn't scale. Justin.tv has a very spiky traffic pattern and when the spikes went up rather than down the team realized that VitalStream didn't handle th eload very well and users kept being cut off time and time again.

The next attempt involved Wowza, a lower cost alternative to Flash Media Server, and a custom built, Python based stream replicator which Kyle developed. This stream replicator used to take the incoming live feed and pushed it out to 5 Wowza boxes. The setup worked ok to an extend, but another wall was being hit when some features could not be implemented due to Wowza being a closed source platform. The team had to try their third approach.

Again Python was utilized to build a custom server alongside a custom protocol which the server instances use to communicate with one another. These server clusters contain multiple origins and are able to redirect streams depending on load, something that is according to Kyle not possible with existing servers and licensing.
The protocol to send and receive the Flash video stream is of course RTMP - but this protocol is converted by Python into their own custom built protocol and then back again to RTMP before it hits the Flash Player. Neat! Moreover, all streams are also recorded and archived.
Deployment is handled over Amazon EC2, the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, a system which allows for immense scalability at the push of a button.

The text chat is also not what it first appears to be. In fact it's simply a Flash UI for an IRC based chat system. these guys clearly know how to build a solid and hugely scalable system on a budget.
The streaming operations run 24/7 nonstop, and result in a monthly data transfer of around 10 terabyte. Peak throughout is somewhere around 1 GBit/sec.

So there you go, large scale Flash video broadcasts on a less than ordinary backend. I think what these guys have pulled off is genius.

The Ameegos.com song

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 13:12:00 +0100

Some of you may remember my little pet project at Ameegos.com which I set up to teach myself some FCS skills back in the days. The site is still ticking over nicely with a loyal following of a nice bunch of people. And not only that but one of them (Weisel) has now written a song about Ameegos and it's brilliant!
Obviously you'd have to know the regulars on the site to appreciate the song fully but still I think it's good even for 'outsiders'. Enjoy.
PS: there's also a blog about the site - which makes me think I really ought to build a user profile system. In fact I wouldn't mind paying someone to do this for me... Do you have some Coldfusion skills? Contact me if you'd like to take on the project of building a little user administration system (basic user profiles, image upload, password management, the usual).

The Making of Heidies: 5 Days of Live Webcasting

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 14:38:00 +0100

I really wanted to follow up on this and I am happy to now present you with an email interview with an official spokesperson from Diesel.
As you may remember, Diesel instigated the Heidies campaign in which two girls hijack Diesel.com, holding their underwear salesman and his unreleased intimate collection hostage, and broadcast live for five days, courtesy of Flash Media Server.
So without any further delay, here's the lowdown on how the Heidies campaign came to life and was finally delivered.

1. Could you provide some background info on the Heidies project?
The project was developed by Diesel in collaboration with FARFAR, starting from an idea which was presented by the Swedish agency about 6 months ago. Having originally thought of a web TV experience, with 2 girls locked in a room through a web stream, the combined team built around it a whole script, including the hostage situation and the fully interactive experience with the camera angles, the chat, and the girls' requests. To Diesel, it was very important to have the user feeling always in control of the situation and to keep interacting with the site. In particular, FARFAR was extremely active in the creativity of the script - integrating the crazy wacky situations that happened in the room.

2. What made you choose Flash Video over another solution? Was there another technology that 'lost out'?
In this project it was very important to maintain the user on the same screen, whilst at the same time changing camera angles - much in the same way that real security cameras work. That's why we chose Flash, even though technically it was a more challenging project. We needed to have an interface which was not limiting when customising the interface.

3. Did you feel that you were entering unchartered territory? After all not many high profile sites have used live Flash streaming before.
Most definitely, not just because of the clearly bold step of changing logo, look & feel, etc, but the fact that we chose 5 simultaneous feeds was because we truly did want to give the user the control of their own experience. Even though a "Directors cut" was available at 256Kbs (we were glad you appreciated the quality!) the other 4 angles were all streaming simultaneously at 128 kbs, which meant that anyone that chose his own camera angle. For us it was very important not to force the user into a specific experience, but we wanted each individual to build their own personal interactive experience with the 3 models - That was the major breakthrough of this project.

4. It was live wasn't it? :-)
YES!

5. What does the setup on site look like? Could you provide some technical details on that? Is there a certain encoder that you are using? Is the encoding done via Flash Player (using the Spark codec) or Flix 8 Live maybe (using VP6)?
Wow! the setup for us was amazing. Briefly, we used the following System. We had a total of 7 cameras, 5 fixed and 2 mobile, out of which we chose which were the ones that were streamed at one time were. The 5 cameras went to a splitter that divided the signal in two, to send one part to the video mixing table. This is where the directors cut was edited, which was simultaneously streamed. The system was made up of 6 computers, each one was coding a specific camera, together with the sound, which had followed a parallel route up to this point. It was sent to the internet AND to the back up system (yep, its ALL on tape!) Irontec, based in Bilbao, thought up the whole system, very complex but very effective, especially when you take into account that we gave them 5 days to do everything! The encoding was done using Flix 8 Live - VP6 codec

6. Which content delivery network did you use and why?
We delivered the video through Vitalstream. We knew about their experience delivering Flash Video and that gave us confidence. But a great point in their favour was the constructive and supportive team that they had working with on this project, which made everything a lot smoother for us.

7. Any lessons learnt along the way? Any hiccups that others could learn from? Any challenges that you couldn't overcome? Any major setbacks?
The major lesson - which we had kind of foreseen anyway - is that if you do a TV production, and then add the fact that is a 24h non stop TV production, and on top of that add that its a web streaming, fully Interactive 24h non stop TV production, and on top of that add that the 3 human beings inside that room were the craziest, nicest people, then you just have to be prepared not to sleep for about 15 days - I think the average was a 4 hour nap a day that the whole team had. It was very challenging, very hectic, and extremely rewarding experience.

8. The livestreams are now offline. What's the verdict, was the project successful?
We feel that it was successful, not in just quantitative terms - tripled site traffic, innumerable chat messages (including many emotional pleas to Diesel not to close down the site), over 1,000 blog postings, etc - but specifically in a qualitative sense. The people interacting during those 5 days were simply hooked on the concept. Real relationships arose - for 24h people would sit up and interact with the room, to the point of going off sick to stay at home and carry on with this unique experience. For us it was a very rewarding project.

9. Can you provide some figures around bandwidth used, sessions served, current users and the like?
Our site tripled traffic at around the third day - form 29,000 average to almost 100,000 visits. We were expecting massive bandwidth issues from day one, which is why we "over" engineered the system. I don't think the system went down once. Whenever there was a "supposed" bandwidth issue, it was in fact Hair&Make up which insisted in going inside the room to give the models a make over... :-)

Thank you. Send our best wishes to the Heidies! I know they can be hard work at times, I have one at home.

Who built the Diesel Intimate site?

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 13:31:00 +0100

Does anyone know which agency is behind the Diesel Intimate 'Lockin' site? I'd like to have a chat with agency or individual that built it; it would be great to get a little behind the scenes look at the setup for this operation (and also find ways that would make it harder for third parties to leech the streams, a challenge that appears to be tricky to overcome on a CDN).

Diesel Intimate: Live 24/7 Flash Streaming

Thu, 25 Jan 2007 16:58:00 +0100

My good friend Tink (he's into this type of filthy stuff ;-) just pointed me towards the Diesel Intimate 'Lockin' site. There you can watch a bunch of teens doing, well, not much really.
Anyways the nice thing is that the site is using Flash Video (apparently via Vitalstream) to push the *live* video out. I've got a feeling that we'll be seeing a lot more of this sort of stuff this year. I wonder how they are pushing the video... (btw we're trying the new Flash Media Encoder at the LFPUG meeting this evening).

YouTube now uses Flash Media Server

Mon, 11 Dec 2006 17:29:00 +0100

I bet that got your attention :-)
YouTube has just started to leverage Flash Media Server to - wait for it - allow users to record video clips directly from their webcam. And for the record and to avoid confusion: the video clips served by the site are still progressively downloaded, not streamed.
The actual recording application is about as basic as it can get, with a video object and a bunch of components tossed on Stage (see image, that's me on the phone to Chad Hurley). The camera dropdown didn't even reflect my actual camera - maybe they should try my free Camchooser component.
It would be nice of the recording would actually work lol. I failed to produce a recording both in IE and Firefox. Every time I clicked record, the button disappeared and the fields on the left disabled themselves... The status field showed 'not recording' which leads me to believe that it was, well, not recording.
Nice one for trying though, I am sure many ~~people~~ teenagers will use it. It's good to see YouTube finally leveraging FMS in this way, it took them long enough. In fact I find FMS heavily underutilized, mainly because a lot of potential clients to not know enough about its great capabilities. Now YouTube just need to hire somebody who can actually build a working app ;-)