Case Study: Automatic Stream Insertion

The old Yahoo! way of getting streams ready required a producer or designer to open up the player (a SWF file) and hard-code in the name of the video clip, the place where it resides, and other metadata. And he’d need to do this for each stream. Now, with AdVision, that is all done by the custom player as it reads the XML file.

In developing AdVision, Mancini has converted his job from a volume nightmare to a manageable process. After a year of AdVision use at the Streaming Center, Mancini reports, "We can now stream more with less human interaction and less effort," and can accomplish in a matter of hours what used to take a week.

What Mancini has done, essentially, is create a framework for a process. The parallel in the document management world would be creating a fill-in-the-blanks form or routing slip. Using Flash components, Mancini has built a form-like User Interface that connects an XML file to the Yahoo! content management system and to the server. He or one of his producers fills in the blanks with stream name, location, etc., and AdVision does the rest.

Now, thanks to AdVision, if they want to change any aspect of how a stream is delivered, all they have to do is make some minor changes to the XML file. For example, if Mancini wants to replace a stream of the trailer for The Hulk with a stream of a Van Helsing trailer, all he has to do is change a single identifying number. He doesn’t have to re-invent the wheel.

AdVision has been a godsend, especially for the producers at Yahoo!, who are "probably the least technical of us all," says Mancini. "Now our producers can set this up quickly without having to hook into the Flash Communication Server and without having to re-encode each day," he says.

Using Flash and the Flash Component Architecture "allowed us to encapsulate thousands of lines of code under the hood for hooking into our existing Yahoo! platforms and for delivery of the streaming video," says Mancini. "Flash designers use the component to set up their ads quickly without having to know how the streaming and underlying processes all work together."

That frees up Mancini’s staff to focus on other things instead of being bogged down in the nuts-and-bolts of streaming delivery, Mancini says. "Our designers can spend their time working on the interface, the visual look and feel. We didn’t want to have to train each designer how to tie into the server. Now they don’t have to worry about that; they can concentrate on making the visual design really sing and dance."