Welcome, WebbAlert!
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.
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