Case Study: Automatic Stream Insertion

Mancini and his Yahoo! staff have also customized the way they monitor their streams using the Flash Communication Server MX. "Having such a large pool of Flash Communication Servers pushing millions of streams per day across the Yahoo! network is definitely something that needs to be closely monitored," says Mancini. "Using the open server-admin API available from Macromedia, we were able to write our own graphical server monitoring app that combined all servers into a single view. This enables us to tell at a glance how much traffic we are serving at any moment, as well as view five-minute, ten-minute, and 24-hour histories of server performance and monitor memory/CPU usage, server uptime, and overall server health."

Today, Chris Mancini is very happy about how AdVision has improved his work life. He says Yahoo! management is happy about it too, because it "helps our clients stay head of the curve and keeps the end users engaged and interested." The proof of this, he says, is in the results, which include "the overall increase in AdVision click-throughs, the increase in impression-to-stream, and the overall increase in stream duration for users on both high and low-bandwidth connections."

Using Flash, says Macromedia’s Hock, similar organizations can do similar things. In fact, many already have. "Nowadays it seems like everyone is moving to this model—CNET, Amazon, and Comcast have all automated their streaming using components like this," he says, "But Chris Mancini and Yahoo! were the pioneers."