Flashcomguru.com: Site Check

Posted At : August 3, 2007 2:35 PM | Posted By : Stefan Richter | Related Categories: FMS , Site Check

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.

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The Ameegos.com song

Posted At : March 12, 2007 11:12 AM | Posted By : Stefan Richter | Related Categories: Site Check

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).

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The Making of Heidies: 5 Days of Live Webcasting

Posted At : February 22, 2007 12:38 PM | Posted By : Stefan Richter | Related Categories: FMS , Site Check

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.

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Who built the Diesel Intimate site?

Posted At : January 26, 2007 11:31 AM | Posted By : Stefan Richter | Related Categories: Site Check

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).

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Diesel Intimate: Live 24/7 Flash Streaming

Posted At : January 25, 2007 2:58 PM | Posted By : Stefan Richter | Related Categories: Site Check

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).

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YouTube now uses Flash Media Server

Posted At : December 11, 2006 3:29 PM | Posted By : Stefan Richter | Related Categories: Site Check

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 ;-)

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