Integrated Video
Posted by Tom Manos on May 24, 2010, 10:15 AM EDT
As you've no doubt seen (and if you haven't, check out Connect757), we've been more than just experimenting with video in the last few weeks.
The results have been pretty spectacular.
It's no big feat to embed a flash video player into a web page, it seems like everyone does that. What makes videos in Concourse Connect so special is that we can schedule them, we can chat and comment about them in real time, and we've integrated them both at the highest level in a Connect system, and at the individual levels of Groups, Businesses, and other profiles.
We started with the simplest and most pervasive: youtube. Including a youtube video in a blog or wiki is as simple as including a graphic file in our WYSIWYG editor. Youtube is built in.
But that didn't remain very fun for very long, and pretty soon we were wanting live video. Embedding a basic, live video stream turned out to be almost comically simple. Once you knew how to produce live broadcasts using your preferred provider and how to work with the embed codes, you could just copy and paste into the html editor, and you had a viewer. Nice, but still not what we wanted.
So next we integrated the various live video services (ustream, watershed, youtube, justin.tv, mystream) into the configuration for each profile. This allows our users to set them up once, and then very transparently access their video streams on any of the services on their own pages. Services like ustream allow our users to do free live broadcasts to their Connect profile. It's quite impressive.
We're still getting all the use cases sorted out for the video services, but we're using it all now to great effect in Connect757.
But I still don't like the idea of relying solely on 3rd party services to stream video, so we've been working on a fully integrated streaming video server for ConcourseConnect. The work is going very well, and you can even see the results in one of my blog posts. This video is one I took at my daughter's school using a tiny hand-held camera, and uploaded to our beta video server. It plays great and the server gives us lots of capabilities with respect to branding the videos, monitoring the server, and extracting usage statistics. Our server will handle just about any kind of video you throw at it: Windows Media, Quicktime, all the various mpeg standards, and more. It does on the fly transcoding, and has lots of other useful and cool features. We'll be testing and incorporating more of those features in the next week or so.
Maintaining your own streaming video server may not be for everyone running a Connect system - it takes work, hardware, and bandwidth. But for our larger customers, a complete, integrated system with video server is a very powerful tool.
