Live Streaming Video
Recently, EyeWonder got even more press over a wicked cool ad that we worked on with Stinson Partners for their client, GE. GE had an ambitious, and very forward-thinking, notion to run branding ads related to their differing business objectives, and then on a Thursday afternoon, switch those ads dynamically to display an instantly-playing, live-steaming event within those ads to allow their CEO, Jeff Immelt, to communicate directly with stock investors.
There have been lots of press over this, but I’m sure for some of you more technically-inclined people, you’re wondering, “why is this a big deal - flash has had live streaming for a little while now?” Well, good question! I’ll tell you why:
- Live streaming events are typically shown on websites. While at a platform level, there is no difference between a website using flash vs. a website running an ad using flash, it’s important to understand SCALE. Typically, large events would be considered a few thousand people. This ad served live streaming video to over 640,000 users for an hour-long event. To run a live event through an ad, you have to consider that your event may have to accommodate up to 100 times more concurrent users than a typical website event.
- Akamai was fantastic during this whole process! EyeWonder and Akamai have been long-standing partners, but it’s just really exciting to see a partnership grow like this into something to be able to support this sort of event. Their infrastructure utilized the latest available version of Flash Media Server and they also helped us do loads of testing, retesting, and thinking through contingency plans. They, of course, also worked with Stinson and GE on the live encoding service. You have to remember that you’re not just supporting the video serving, you also need to think situationally about what happens on the encoding side. Akamai proved once again why they are leaders in the space.
- Over 6000 questions were submitted to the interviewer during the live event. The clever solution to doing this quickly, efficiently, and without building out massive support behind the scenes was to use our EyeWonder send-to-friend feature. You can see some additional questions in the FAQ and the VOD version of the webcast here.
Overall, great work to everybody on the EyeWonder and Akamai teams and also congrats to Stinson and GE for creating and executing such an innovative, effective idea.