Case Study: Flash Earns Pole Position for Safety-Kleen’s Video Training

Hanfland says Safety-Kleen is currently using Flash Communication Server 1.5 but will soon upgrade to Media Server 2. To make sure all of its employees can use Flash, the company has purchased "7,500 concurrent licenses," he says.

More Than Just a Pretty Face
Hanfland says that the major advantage of using the Flash server is that it allows him to do not just progressive download but also true live streaming and to also automatically adjust the stream to the user. "When a progressive stream downloads, it downloads onto your computer and consumes hard disk space, and it may not be adaptable to your computer's connection speed." But at Safety-Kleen, thanks to Flash video, says Hanfland: "We're figuring out at what connection speed you are actually connected, and then we select the right stream quality for you and send that over to you live. So it's like Webcast streams; it doesn't take up space, doesn't take download time at the beginning. It starts playing immediately. So we are live all at the same time; everybody sees the same thing at the same time."

There are, of course, other products that can do this, says Hanfland, "But I have yet to see the same image quality as well as the same buffering capabilities. And if I use the component of Flash Media Server and use Flash 8 as the front-end development tool, they are seamlessly integrated. So I can create visually appealing interfaces and applications and do that without having to learn another coding language."

Along with using streaming for on-demand training, Hanfland and his staff occasionally use the Flash server for simple Webcasting. Most Safety-Kleen Webcasts are live presentations, such as CEO messages. They also use Webcasting for conferencing. "When we're doing something like a live synchronous conference and everybody has to be on it at the same time, then I use Communication Server," he says.

Safety-Kleen doesn't use Macromedia's popular Breeze platform due to "budget issues" with that product, and has instead developed its own tool in-house for creating virtual classroom-style experiences.

Safety-Kleen's elearning server currently holds 292 Flash-based training videos, which take up 13GB of storage space. In addition, the server holds 290 other training courses, only about 10 percent of which contain embedded video clips. These courses take up 1.16 GB. That's surprisingly little storage space. And it's due to the fact that "Flash compresses like crazy," says Hanfland.At Safety-Kleen headquarters in Plano, Texas, Hanfland and his staff also have access to an entire video production studio. The equipment there includes three Sony MiniDV camcorders and a Sony HDR-FX1 HDV camera. Their additional software tools include Adobe Premiere and After Effects for editing and postproduction. And, finally, they use Flash Professional 8 to encode their footage.

Although Hanfland's training group occasionally shoots high-definition footage, he says hi-def footage has its limitations in his company. "We don't need visual detail, there's not much fine tuning in our business," he says. At Safety-Kleen speed is more important than resolution. "We have reasonably low connection speeds to our branches. So if someone just wants to watch a video, my primary goal is to get the video to them as soon as I can without them having to wait an hour or a half-hour for a buffer to fill up, and then have them interrupted again to re-buffer and so on."

Currently, streams are made available to users in three quality levels: low (90Kbps at 240x180 resolution), high (140Kbps at 320x240), and very high (1000Kbps at 720x480). Hanfland says that the very high quality files are usually used for sales presentations, with reps downloading the file onto their laptops before making the rounds to customers. Likewise, downloading to a laptop is good for large group or classroom presentations. "If you're in a classroom, you don't want the students to have to wait while the video buffers," says Hanfland. "So we usually download it the night before and have it ready to play." Hanfland sees Safety-Kleen emphasizing streaming over progressive download in the future, especially with Flash Media Server 2, which he says is "more advanced in detecting connection speeds, so I can actually serve streams out all the time, which is much better. The other advantage of a stream is that if it doesn't download, it isn't cached; so if I make an update to the video and send it out, the user won't play the cached version. They will play back the newest version." Hanfland says that right now Safety-Kleen's output is about 90 percent download versus 10 percent live streaming, but the percentage of streaming is increasing every day.

What else might the future hold for Safety-Kleen? What is on Hanfland's wish list? "Well, live encoding of an uncompressed video stream that is dynamically adapted to the user's connection speed would be my dream," says Hanfland, "because right now I still have to create three different video streams, three different Flash files, and then serve the right one up. But if I could just put up an MPEG or an uncompressed AVI, then I could just have this thing encoded on demand. That would be my dream. That would be just wonderful."