Laurent Bridenne's web log about multimedia strategy, design, usability, technologies and much more... Multimedia

This blog is coming to an end, as is my time with this great company which I've been privileged to work for 9 years...

The spin-off of this blog is now located at http://NewDigitalMedia.wordpress.com/

See you there!
Laurent

Video is on every major web sites today.

As I've talked in the past with my counterparts at other companies (Cisco, Applied Materials, Intel, Oracle) as part of the Bay Area Streaming Media Group (BASMUG), it really astonished me that all of them were at various levels of implementation, deployment and usage... yet most of them had the same problems: managing that content.

From using streaming video as a grass-root movement to have it be part of the corporate culture. All of them had a system/process in place to create, encode and post.

But as content grows and the need to effectively manage all types of online media in a flexible, branded environment, a new system has to be in place.

That system needs to provide design flexibility in how media is laid-out. Will it be embedded into a blog or into a product page? how about a launch page for a live webcast? A simple URL variable can set that. Web designers can work with it, not around it in order to create a seamlessly integrated rich-media experience.

Now, what features/content do particular users see? Can a generic viewer access partner content? Can they view internal (confidential) content? Absolutely not. Should you set up multiple instances of that system for each audience type? No, because managing all of these would prove prohibitive.

How can web publishers effectively have recourse to these media assets, and for these media assets to be part of a content management system, tagged with proper meta-data to improve search results... and maybe even dynamically generate content playlists without the human need to hand code/pick specific UUIDs?

Should we all just hand it all to YouTube to manage this for us? Well... sometimes, that would make sense. That's the easy way out. I don't like easy way out... not challenging and it never is a long-term solution in my humble opinion.

However, as I think about the bigger picture and all the integration points within a company, that system could help generate leads, train/inform sales folks faster, leverage existing content to maximize ROI, help drive marketing campaigns, boost employee communication effectiveness, boost brand awareness and have all these supporting metrics to prove or course-correct any multimedia program... This type of stuff gets my head spinning... in a good way :-)

Don't forget about offline media. Tradeshows, customer briefing centers and digital signage systems could also benefit from it. This system could transcode, or make raw assets available for download and local playback, or create specific playlists based on the customer card being swiped at a tradeshow or building lobby, to bring that extra little something to the client to say: "we know what YOU care about"

As this medium grows exponentially, the system needs to be flexible/scalable to meet new users, integrate in internal/external workflows from various organizations without breaking in the process.

This is what keeps me up at night. Ensuring that multimedia is being used as effectively as possible, tied into all the various departments through a single system that would be flexible/scalable enough to have at least a 5 year lifespan...

Now that I wrote this down, I could try to go to sleep... for a while

how what fun! Where has this tool been all my life??... ok... 2-3 years ago (being dramatic)

did it all on my own and even got my very own ticker... sweet

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

Was talking earlier about Virtual
Tradeshows...


People automatically think it's another Second Life. Well... not exactly.

First, the audience is probably not the one you want to sell stuff to. So then, for a corporation, how do you prove ROI? Well, for Second Life... you don't. You can increase the Brand awareness and create an entry point into web sites. That's the big win.

Seems to me like the virtual tradeshows are slanted more towards sales and hard ROI $$. I'm on a mission to generate $$ for Sun... can't you tell? ;-)

I like the new video player do-it-yourself tool from YouTube. Makes it sooo easy to change the look/feel. Check out this thing I created in less than a minute...

If you're thinking about managing your own media infrastructure... The Wowza Media Server Pro is $995 it has familiar feature-set as Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server ($4,500).

hmm... let me see... basically the same product, just 4-5 times less expensive... I just can't decide which one to use!! oh... and Wowza runs on Solaris (Adobe runs on LINUX or the soft-to-hack-in OS)

So, in theory, say you have a start up business (with streaming video in there as a component of your services), you could acquire a try and buy box from us, download Solaris for free, and wait for your first paycheck to get an inexpensive system.

Talk about the flash video business heating up!!

Red5 is free and open source, but it doesn't offer the same usabiliy.

designing Rich Media Applications... a biggie in my world (#2 after compelling content)
This is a great article interview. Really like the upcoming eBay...

This might be more targeted at larger companies...

Trying to figure out a localization strategy for multimedia, inside and out.

Each geo has their own culture, terminology and language. On top of that, certain facets of an industry/market is more developed in some than others.

How do you set up a creation, translation and distribution systems that lets you create once, run everywhere in all languages?

Right now, the cheapest (if you can call it cheap) is to provide close-captioning for specific languages for audio, video.

But how about presentations and interactive tours where graphics have text in them, voice over is mixed with on-screen video of a presenter and everything is so closely bundled together as a rich-media experience that it hinders your localization process?

How do you know how to deliver content to in what language? IP or user selectable?

Let the user choose would be the best in my opinion. I could be trying to view a live webcast from France in Japan, and I wouldn't need to see Japanese text overlayed on top of the video, just because of my local IP address.

in the interest of corporate transparency and collaboration...

what would you like to see Sun do online w/ multimedia that isn't happening yet?

We have our own ideas (and so does management and BU's) and ongoing plans, but YOU, the potential customers, inquisitive minds and innovators, should let us know what is important for YOU. You're the last piece of the puzzle, the major piece of the puzzle, but the ones we don't have ongoing direct feedback with about this.

What should we communicate that we don't. How can multimedia help you get what you need to make informed decisions, help you a your job or school project??

I know multimedia is a wide array of things... so here are examples to get your mind going:
- weekly developer screencasts on best practices with our tools/solutions
- like video chats with Sun innovators
- more (or less) executive overview videos for our products and services
- online demos for our products (see it in action and/or interact with it?)
- cell phone delivery (for audio, video, screencasts)
- chat with BU's about particular products
- more YouTube videos of BU's giving a 3mn marketing monologues
- having all SunU classes available for free, online
- ???


you get the gist... thoughts?

I've been looking at various vendor solutions (Mentorware and ZiffDavis) that provide that "Virtual Tradeshow". It's always pretty expensive and too new to be fully understood. I, personally thought that these solutions just duplicate what can be done in Second Life... but Second Life has its sets of limitations, like not being able to gather attendee's info, business needs to generate good Leads for our sales force.


It's also pretty cool if we can showcase our exciting tools and technologies online, while having a place for mavens to participate and collaborate to such an event.

Came across an interesting article about it, which stirred up this whole topic again... and you know what? this article says "know your audience" and "content is king"... funny how everything we do online revolves around that formula ;-)

Question to our audience: would you want Sun to have a Virtual Tradeshow??

I really hope not because I really love the whole adobe suite of products... However, there seems to be something brewing between Air/Flex and JavaFX

you can also see David Berlind's blog about it...
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Berlind/?p=926

What I'd like to know is how to leverage JavaFX for our multimedia presentation engine (not to be
confused by JavaFX script)...

Two articles related to gaming popped-up today in my inbox. Just thought I'd share...

Universities bring video games into classrooms
Physical therapists prescribe Wii time

Wondering when I'll see an article like: "Companies recommend employees to play video games 2 hours per day during biz hours"

Adobe released their HD showcase

http://www.adobe.com/products/hdvideo/hdgallery/?promoid=BQMSZ

"Passion, Content, Truth" - this defines successful media programs

Long gone are the times when EVERYTHING had to be highly polished media content that needed to go through an ad/design agency, shot in a multi-million dollar studio and edited for days at a time on the finest equipment one could afford (all at the expense of the company... and shareholders)

Trust me, there are still times when you need this level of prodution for an event or briefing center. The last thing you want at a Customer Briefing Center is to show a product marketing manager video ala YouTube (inaudible, boring talking head) spinning/selling their product. Yuck! (IMO)

There's nothing like video or screencasts to communicate this "truth". no need for editing. show the product. tell your story, share your passion.

just keep it short.

if a picture is worth a thousand words, don't write a novel by having a 5mn video. 2mn is a good "soft spot" for timely/compelling content. You may have 10 seconds for boring content, so don't waste time with fancy introductions

There has been a shift in Marketing... actually, more like a counter-culture where the least amount of spin or polishing is introduced, the more people pay attention to what you have to say. I personally tune-out ads (print, radio, TV, movies). People's real stories, passion grab us more than a tag-line or fancy logos.

The more interactive users can be with your content (commenting, rating, playlisting, etc.) the more power you give them to really DO your marketing for you, in an un-marketing way.

Make more money... Learn Solaris

Quick note for our University audience.

If you're taking a sys admin class or want to get a job in this field, you could learn Windows, Linux and get a job somewhere. But, if you want to make a bit extra than your collegues, learn Solaris. You'll get a job at larger (more stable) companies and get paid more. It's more of a specialty.

We all have college bills to pay. Solaris can help... talk about a multi-faceted value proposition. Good for the business, good for the employee, and good for the environment.

One of my pet peeve: I really wished Solaris was more like the Mac OSX... very multimedia friendly for creating your own media and easy to use for someone like me (not a programmer. no patience for command line)

You don't have to be a UNIX programmer to use a Mac... you don't have to play command line games to see what ZFS has to provide in Leopard. ALTHOUGH, if you want to use command line, you can. I'm a geek... but not that type of geek.

Trust me, I want to use Solaris, but for a media guy who wants to capture and edit audio/video, create graphics all while doing email, play music, instant messaging, video chats and browsing the web... it's not happening.

I might not be the target consumer for Solaris, but I still want to use what my company creates... if it was doing what I needed to do for my daily job and my personal life effectively, I'd switch in a heartbeat and beta test the heck out of it.

let me indulge you with a dream:

Looking Glass running on Solaris 11, on a sexy-looking high-powered low power (eco-friendly) laptop, with audio and video capture/editing capabilities -video and screencasts- (looking out for our developers trying to share coding best practices and cool stuff they're creating), Blue-Ray RW drive, local calendar with mobile device (phone, iphone) and web (google cal) universal synch, text/audio/video chat tool that can integrate to skype/AOL-IM/Yahoo-IM/others, photo library application, open office, mozilla suite for browser/mail, social synchronizer (blogs, vblogs, facebook, linkedin, etc.) to let you know up-to-the-minute if someone left you a comment or superpoked you, some cool high-powered emulator technology to let users install and run iTunes, photoshop and dreamweaver apps and the such...

and it shall be called: "Eclipse" (the Sun, the Moon and the Earth... our everything)

Again.. I'm probably not the targeted user base for Solaris :-p

Well, the conference ended. Sessions covered a lot of various aspects of streaming video. Went to all the booths. Talked to a bunch of folks.

There more CDN companies starting up. There's more videos being put on the web through YouTube types of applications. No matter where you look on social media sites, video is there. IPTV is also growing.

How people search, view, interact with this ever growing content is great business for everyone involved in the chain.

First, it's great for content producers. Finding good producers with fresh ideas to inject a lot more creativity and innovation. It's open for anyone to create video content and be the next big thing.

Second, it's great for viewers. Being entertained, taught, informed in new and refreshing ways by getting what they want, when they want. It's a Tivo world out there and people are only getting pickier.

Third, it's great for developers. I didn't much about JavaFX, but a lot with Flash and how it easily integrates with web tools, backend application/databases in order to provide rich-media custom experiences. With anyone being able to write actionscripts and for designers to play around flash features/players, this is going to be an exciting year.

Fourth, it's a GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY for Sun to cash in on all of it. We can potentially sell more IPTV systems, more servers (for delivering content, compressing files, automation, storage of raw and encoded media, powering digital asset management systems) and get that Solaris footprint out there.

There are so many startups that would have a better chance to survive if they were thinking big picture from the start. Using our 64-thread chips, high speed storage, virtualization... you name it. We can make people succeed, and share that success.

This was the buzz word a couple years ago and everyone wanted one, without really understanding what it was...

People think a podcast is an mp3 file. Something you can only play on an iPod. Well, check out the definition first.

Here a quick top-10 plan that everyone should have before jumping in... (I know. Some folks are allergic to planning, but bear with me)





10. Why are you doing this?
hint: you're on the right path if you want to share REAL insightful, relevant conversations... probably not if you're doing this just because it's cool and will help you sell more products.
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9. Identify a niche
Needs to be a unique group. Specialists and experts. Can't be... let's say... everyone who might be interested about everything you or your company does.
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8. What can you offer them? What"s the value?
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7. How do you want them to respond? (contact, buy, fill out form, send email, etc...)
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6. Who is involved?
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5. Content, length?
hint: think a few minutes.... not dozens...
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4. How many episodes?
hint: it needs a start and end. An end could be the start of a new beginning.
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3. How is your audience going to find YOU?
hint: marketing your marketing tool
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2. How will you measure success?
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... and the # 1 is...
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1. Content needs to be short, sweet, funny... be dramatically different! Why should your audience care? (... and don't be afraid to ASK THEM!)


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big thanks to Jose
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Final Note: Successful media always revolves around CONTENT. How you tell a compelling, relevant, honest story for what you're trying to get across.

Here at Streaming Media West... been going to these since 2000.

It's always a good place to see what's going on with video (used to be more multimedia oriented in the past) and what people are doing.

Seems like everyone is jumping on the Flash video bandwaggon, which is where we've been over the past year. Real, Quicktime and Windows might lose... although I'm pretty sure that Microsoft will spend billions of $$ on their "Silverlight"platform. I think Adove won that battle already. At least Microsoft can be happy that they beat Sony with their gaming system. You win some, you lose some.

As I said, this conference focuses on "video"... same as the "Video Web Summit" back in June. I wish there was more multimedia oritented, that's my only pet peeve for this.

It's interesting to know how people are using video in their organization, business and institutions. There's definitely similarities between all of these types of applications. Some of the same problems that were identified in 2000 are still here. How to create effective content, what CDN should you use, how can you search multimedia, etc.

For this entry, I wanted to tak about User Generated Content. It is the big talk of the week. The YouTubes of the world are now swamping the network with billions of videos streaming around the globe. Amid all this traffic, it creates opportunities for CDNs to cash in on media infrastructures. P2P hybrid networks makes sense in some instances, for "hot" content, but presents a barrier to entry with client side apps that need to be installed and security, resources issues. For example, using P2P, you can reduce your CDN costs, but that content comes from other people's
CDNs... OPR (other people's resources). Would companies allow their systems, their high-priced network to be piggy-backed for free? Some kinks have to be worked out first...

Next, how do you find content you want (or didn't know you wanted) to see. Relevance. How to provide viewers with the correct content? Right now, it's based on search parameters, online behavioral monitoring... and privacy information. It weeds out all the "spam" who don't correctly tag media when publishing, just to get the hits (booo these people!!!). The most interesting one is behavioral. Based on previous searches, drill-downs within a site, the system "learns" about you.

What do you or other people like you recommend, rate the highest, share with others? Would that content be relevant for you? The most touchy subject is intrusion of privacy in order to increase the likeliness of really finding what you really want (or didn't know you want). Having personal profiles shared with search engines that will know your work experience, music, tv shows, travels, interests, etc.

Finally, how can you apply these video social networking sites for an enterprise. What can be, shouldn't be shared? Who monitors it? How can an internal tool like this increase a company's productivity and competitive edge? What if the meetings with the execs were available for all employees to see, to get the story straight from the top, versus the diluted pass-down that takes a week... a month... where it could be hours....

now... how about the opposite. What if employees could share best practices, ideas to the management/exec layer? That would be pretty cool...

The issue: with so many social networks (such as blogs, facebook, ning, LinkedIn, etc.) not tied to each other, I'm letting certain properties lay there not regularly updated. I have so many RSS feeds that I barely glance at it anymore until a word pops-up from the headline. It takes me a month to accept comments on our YouTube videos and weed through the spam messages associated with it.

.. waiting for a web 2.0 app management tool now...

I previously talked about what makes compelling media... soon realized it was heading in a different direction.

Example: do you want to hear an executive talking about how cool their company and products are? or hear about an executive talk about business problems, ecological issues and more?

Jonathan's blog is the prefect example of that. True transparency.

But let's go a step further... does it need to be an employee of that company telling the story? Absolutely not. In the "not-so-new" wave of user generated content, users speak out about the good, the bad and the ugly about someone else's products and services. People trust this information more because because they know it's real. Users don't have anything to gain or lose from the information they give...

Bottom line: We need more word of mouth from mavens - versus - managers talking about their company's products.

That is... UNTIL we come across another tipping point when the true mavens (non-biased experts) become corrupted. I've seen this already. Companies paying bloggers to do product placement for them... that will ultimately turn blogging into another billboard and we'll just tune it out, losing this precious communication channel.

What makes compelling online media? the technology used, the audio/visual quality or the content (loosely based on a marketing strategy)?

I first went at this last year by analyzing various sites that had online media assets and compared it to Sun's.

1. Technology: We needed to identify what's the most available/deployed media player in the world. That one was fairly easy... that's Flash. It's the most flexible technology. We really wanted to use Java...

2. Audio/Visual quality: Everything we created must be of the highest standards. People are very proud of these production standards. When I looked at other corporate sites, production quality varied from ok to broadcast quality. When I went on YouTube, the quality was from "barely viewable" to broadcast quality.

3. Content: That was a tough one, just because of the targeted audience of various corporate sites/programs and the various marketing strategies behind them. The best were honest and useful information programs that keyed on real-world problems and their solutions... without all the marketing fluff. One of the examples didn't mention the company name until 12mn into the program.

I came away trusting the company and feeling like they really want to help me, wether I buy their products or not. This was above and beyond content, and the information it contained... it was about a story. A light bulb went out.

I then focused on who does the best storytelling on YouTube.. and amazingly enough, quality didn't matter. People are viewing poor quality media as long as it contains relevant, useful information scattered through storytelling. That's useful data. It's the story, not the production value.

It's HERE!!!!!

Solaris SPARC
Solaris x86

rock on...

funny video about the iPhone...

Kinda stressed about that over the past week. Thought I bombed at the Web Video Summit, but people tell me I did good, so I'll take their word for it. Thanks to Bart who made me look good...

It was definitely a new experience. I'm not much of a public speaker, and definitely stepped out of my comfort zone. The thing I was looking forward to were the questions. Based on what I mumbled, what did they get out of it? What ideas did it generate?

Everything revolved around what we trying to do... translating business goals and technical white papers into COMPELLING STORIES. Talking about a media strategy, which includes YouTube strategy (no, don't put everything you have on YouTube), a podcast strategy and an overall multimedia strategy within and outside the company. Whatever we create must be done cost-effectively and re-usable across organizations, across audiences (sales, new hire, developers, etc.)

We have internal production groups that let us produce multimedia (video, audio, flash) anywhere from 20% to 50% cheaper than if we were to use outside vendors (which we still use IF our internal resources are swamped). The added value is that, because we're internally based, we know the Brand, we know all the gotchas for publishing online... that's a huge value add which translates into huge savings... and a better bottom line so we can MAKE MONEY! :-)

When we initially unveiled "Project Blackbox" back in October last year, I was wondering how it would do in the real world, and how we could use this innovative solution for our new multimedia approach.

It didn't take long until someone wanted an interactive tour for this product. This tour put our newest media container to the test. Some of it had to be re-engineered from scratch due to the interactive and rich-media nature of this
asset. I was brought in for the interactivity design and to make sure it would follow Branding, Publishing and Technology guidelines... some of which not fully documented since this multimedia arena keeps evolving, and we keep improving it as we go.

It was one of the most rewarding project I have been part of, mostly because this is the closest thing we have to a best practice of an interactive tour here at Sun. It using the proper technology to tell a compelling story, on Brand... at a fraction of the cost that it would have been if designed/produced by an outside agency. Overall, it was a success of cross-departmental collaboration with the media experts here at Sun.

In the past, we would have done a 15mn video (yawn...) going through all the technical mumbo-jumbo and call it a day. This new approach really opened some eyes. It covered both the technical aspects (with both physical, and conceptual animations) and the BIG PICTURE BENEFITS (what it does for you!). We need more of that, to complement -not replace- the technical details.

Results? We received kudos from Jonathan himself and have been tracking the hits on it ever since it got released. This tour eclipses the technical walkthrough videos. So, now that people are aware of these tours, so they are more receptive to moving their video-centric needs into interactive media. Our approach is to re-purpose [parts of] the video content (needed for various organizations and media outlets) into these tours, in order to bring these development costs even lower (and save Sun $$$)

I am not dissing "video" at all. The point is that some tools are better suited for specific needs/content. Video is the best suit for our Project Blackbox scenarios... like the shake. Pretty cool. People want to see more stress tests... the mojave heat, the antartic cold, thunderstrikes(?)... which reminded me of the blender tests

Can wait to see it in action for SLAC

Corporations are all about social responsibility these days (and eco-friendly)... all for good reasons.

But Sony did something really well. Who knew that the video game industry could help cure Alzheimer? Well, I'm proud to say that I'm a contributor. Thanks to my PS3 and to the power of the network (and Standord University), I was able to help the research.

Maybe all Sun servers should join the research whenever they're idle...  join humanity, one CPU cycle at a time

-- This post is dedicated to my grandmother who slowly faded away with this desease --

I started something new over the past year... a multimedia council, comprised of various groups that are interested in multimedia. All I did was present a high level strategic overview of how we should use media, how we can improve its functionality in a corporate environment and finally, streamlining processes from design to publishing.

Hopefully, if you've visited Sun.com over the past 12 months, you probably saw much improvements on the multimedia side. No more pop-up RealPlayer (w/ RealNetworks Branding) and gratuitous uses of Flash animations. We now have a Branded experience for all of our videos and our Flash assets are developed/designed with more thoughts behind its power for interactivity and rich-media experiences [see Project Blackbox for our high-level corporate-type of media] and technical drilldowns deprived of any marketing spin [like I showed in my previous posts]

That's just the front end stuff. On the backend, we've streamlined so many things on the Brand and Publishing side... but in my opinion, we've just scratched the surface. Maybe it's part of my personality, but I feel like we just got started...

Slowly, we're moving towards having a notion of dynamic publishing and online library of all of Sun's assets.

Here are my next wishes...

1) include screencasts for all of Sun's applications, available both online AND when you start the application (or OS)
2) screencast self-upload tool. Think of YouTube, and add some screencasts... ScreenTube??
3) podcast/vodcast mashup RSS feeds. Get whatever content you need into a SINGLE RSS feed (versus subscribing to 5 different ones)

Anything else you would like to see Sun do? The multimedia council is open for anyone to contribute.

Sun was recently mentioned in a Washington Post article, regarding telecommuting. Couple of good stuff in there, but no mention of the positive ecological impact of not having to drive your car and pollute the air. Also no mention of the financial savings for both the company (like Sun is getting from consolidating their real-estate in pricey Silicon Valley - good move!) and the employee (with the price of gas these days, I can save a couple hundred dollars a month).

I really feel the disconnection from other on-location co-workers that may think a telecommuniter is just goofing off, not really working. When in fact, it's the other way around. I get a LOT more done from home because there are less distraction, no time lost in traffic. However, I do lose out in hallway conversations and face-time with co-workers, managers.

I still haven't found a cool collaboration tool that lets you be "on par" with the on-location employees. Instant Messenging is close. Just like walking into someone's office to have a quick chat, and merging multiple sessions for a hallway conversation. I just wished it had more "visuals". Maybe something like Second Life. It would be pretty cool to "teleport" to meetings and offices to talk/interact, even attend meetings in that world...

This in a quick addition to my previous post about flash 9...
"an." posted a comment on Jonathan's latest blog entry, and pointed me to the beta release of Flash 9 for Solaris

rock on!!!