Castfire

The NFL’s Atlanta Falcons worked with Digitaria and Castfire to relaunch their web presence and we think the both the design and the content are fantastic.  As seen above, the video content is incorporated into the site itself, providing an integrated experience between images, text and video.  As Castfire delivers a single flash video file (flv) and not an xml playlist, custom players throughout the site were easy to build and integrate to provide a seamless experience for the Falcons’ fans.

I have been watching the video work by Matt Moore from the Falcons and have been extremely impressed by the amount and quality of content that he is publishing each day.  The web team for the Falcons, like many of the NFL teams, is small and has very little time. For instance, when the team is playing away: the team is not going to wait for the web team to edit and upload before the bus leaves the stadium! They have to get the content together, edited and posted — sometimes while riding to the airport and uploading via an EVDO connection.

The Castfire platform automates much of the process of publishing content, including transcoding, meta data, multiple formats, jpg and thumbnail images, to offload as much as possible. We have worked with the teams at Digitaria and the Falcons to improve the process, speed and functionality and will continue to make improvements over the coming weeks.

The highlight for me is the incredible series they are producing. My favorite? I know you are thinking it is the Cheerleader Bios, but no: David Irons’ Rooke Diary. It is a fresh and real look into the life of rookies in the NFL.  David Irons’ is extremely funny and hams it up for the camera. You can subscribe here.

Tonight, we welcome WebbAlert to the world! The fabulous Morgan Webb is hosting a daily tech news show, lasting 4-5 minutes and covering the biggest technology news. The information is fresh, interesting and a part of conversations that happen on technology blogs.

Castfire has worked with Federated Media and WebbAlert to launch this new property. In doing so, we worked together to roll out new functionality: media groups and a syndicated player. As building an audience is always key for new properties, they have partnered with a handful of sites and traded promotional spots for placement. To automate this, the two features, while separate, work hand in hand.

A basic building block of Castfire is the concept of a template. While they are standard in website CMS’s, they are quite a new concept for multimedia. We have added a new segment type, Media Group, to our templates that groups multiple segments to one slot. Each time a video is requested, a different media segment is played, allowing for automatic rotation of interstitials. Each of the partner sites will get an equal amount of promotion across all of the video impressions — including rss distribution of quicktime files! This feature works great for not only external promotions, but also cross promoting content within a network. Look for this to be rolled out to many of our clients to promote content across their networks.

Slide out Player for WebbAlert

Originally uploaded by castfire

The second piece of functionality adds a javascript widget that can be placed on partner sites. The widgets displays a jpg image, either a static image or one from the latest episode. Upon clicking on the image, the latest episode will slide out of the image and begin playing. The magic is that this can be set once and Castfire will ensure that the latest episode is always played! No need to know the actual url of the latest episode, having to update html, or having some sort of rss reader figure it out — it is all built into Castfire. This is a variation on the feature that is used by the Killington Ski Resort in their successful podcast.

Congratulations to WebbAlert on your launch! This is definitely a video we will watch each morning…

Additional Coverage: TechCrunch, Fred Wilson, NewTeeVee, Gizmodo, John Battelle