Castfire

A lot of time and effort go into both developing and using API’s.  Their strengths are documented throughout many products on the web. For me personally, Twitter and Flickr have been models of API’s that change the way I created applications. Looking at an API makes my imagination wander, my drive to tinker and create go wild.

However, API’s also require a certain level of aptitude. The user must understand the basics of programming, know what data to capture, what data to store, etc. In the end, an API may be used by millions but only understood by a small percentage of that.  There is, however, an API that we all know how to use: email.

[Side note: my fiancee pointed out to me the other day that I usually spell it "e-mail" with the hyphen. That's the way it was originally spelled.  She said I was showing my age!]

When we created our ftp functionality, we wanted to incorporate an easy method for publishers to be able to use the URL’s and embed statements in their websites without having to log back into Castfire. To accomplish this, after ftp’ing files to Castfire, two e-mails are sent:

1. Acknowledge the files have been uploaded and provide back the URL’s and embed statement for the new episode.  It also states that these files are not currently ready as they are being transcoded.
2. A final e-mail stating that the transcoding has finished and it is available for publishing.

The email is also "smart" because the directory structure of the publisher’s ftp site mirrors the hierarchy of their account. So a network login sees directories for each content producer and channel, as well as directories for each media type (intro, outro, promo).  Each content producer login sees a subset of the network. So a publisher can upload new episodes into the correct channel without having to log in to Castfire - including shows that have multiple content segments.

In addition, default settings, including filenames, metadata, and status can be set for each channel.  This is a huge time savings for the publisher as you can set it once and rarely have to revisit it.

We view these e-mails emails as the most basic API possible!  FTP and email have been around just about as long as the internet and are accessible to a great majority of web users. While it is possible to log in and publish shows through our CMS, it is many times faster and easier to ftp 10 new videos and get an email back when they are complete.

In November, Castfire began powering a video ad campaign with Federated Media and The IT Room that runs on some of the largest technology blogs and sites, including Digg, GigaOM, TechCrunch, Boing Boing, Mashable and more.  While video ad units are nothing new on websites, the campaign was integrated into the RSS feeds of almost all of the sites as well.  In addition, the campaign was comprised of 8 separate videos, of which all of them have been updated or changed throughout time.  The technical hurdles were quite large, but Castfire’s automation, player templating and analytics data warehouses have enable all of the demands.

If you are not familiar with some of the challenges of working with RSS feeds, there are two key areas that needed to be addressed immediately.  First off, the feeds are generally cached by online feedreaders, stripping javascript and other code from the xml.  This removes the ability for an ad server to directly interact with each impression.  Additionally, the many of the large feed readers do not allow for flash components to be used directly in the reader.

Custom players and tracking codes were generated for each of the sites - both the RSS unit and the 300×250 unit, with each of the 8 videos loaded for each.  Publishers were provided a single block of html to place into their RSS feed, for which Castfire is able to manage.  Castfire’s automation and player templates provides the ability for random videos to be played, or for Federated Media to update/change the creative at any time.

Castfire has also worked with many of the online feed readers to ensure that our video players are whitelisted and allowed to be displayed within the reader.  This is a key to this campaign’s success; without being able to view the player, it would be impossible to watch the video!

Scale is a big issue when looking at a campaign like this - RSS can be brutal and some of the sites have the largest RSS audiences out there!  At the time of this blog post, Feedburner reports TechCrunch’s subscribers at 624k.  For each post on all of the sites, a player is displayed, analytics collected, and a video may be played.  Tens of millions of impressions for this single campaign - not including any of the standard episodic content that is published.

The final piece of the puzzle is analytics to which our data warehousing efforts come shining through.  Castfire creates a separate data warehouse for each network.  With multiple fact tables, tons of dimensions, and incredible detail, reports breakdown sites, player impressions, video plays, click throughs, geo information and more.

While 98% of our customers are publishing branded, episodic content, the value of our audio/video platform becomes more apparent as the system is responsible for more and more uses. It is exciting to see our platform continue to grow and expand. </proud parents>

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

Late Thursday night, May 17th, the first episode of Ask a Ninja launched on the Castfire platform. It was soon followed by 17 additional episodes from the archives and we will have the entire catalog published by the end of this week. Now…the episodes have been posted on various platforms since Ask a Ninja started publishing. Why is this different?

• The episodes themselves are dynamically created using a template. There are actually 6 segments to the show that are assembled into either a single flv or mp4 file. Prior to publishing, we changed the template, updated both the ad segments, and updated the DVD segment — none of which required editing on the desktop!
• This is not pre or post roll advertising! The advertisement exists in the musical credits and as the third segment (interstitial). The placement can be changed at any time and on the fly.
• Each segment can maintain it’s own click through links on the flash player. This provides the Ask a Ninja team to have click through directly to their site as well as the advertisement have trackable click through from the player.
• The Ask a Ninja brand is most important! Download links all point to the askaninja.com domain for them to remain in control of their content.
• Castfire is a white label solution that provides the management, distribution, monetization and analysis tools for both FM and Ask a Ninja.

More coverage here:

• NewTeeVee
• ChasNote
• Searchblog
• Ad Rants
• Additional: James Gross
• Andre Torrez

Latest.mp3 is a feature that we developed to ease integration of podcasts through the use of a simple url. Instead of using a specific url for an episode, each account has a unique url that ends in latest.mp3. This url will automatically play the newest episode, allowing for the newest episode to always be played without having to build any rss reader functionality. Killington Ski Resort and the Vail Ski Resorts are using them to re-purpose podcast content to different players and for advertising campaigns.

Killington

The Killington Ski Resort is utilizing this feature in two implementations. First, as seen in the image above, they have integrated a flash player into their homepage that is hardcoded to always play http://serve.castfire.com/audio/snowcast/latest.mp3. This removed the need for their external design team to spend additional hours building in RSS functionality into the site to ensure that the newest weather report is played. It also ensures that the newest episode is played a soon as it has been published.

Killington has also launched an ad campaign, buying rich media space for their flash banner ads. To get the most mileage out of their podcasts, a play button has been added that will play the latest episode featuring weather, ski conditions and mountain specials. The banner ads not only funnel users back to their website, but skiers and boarders can listen to the newest weather conditions and subscribe directly from the banner ad.

Vail

The Vail Ski Resorts have a desktop application, developed by otoLabs, that provides customers with constant picture, video, and text updates from the mountain. Utilizing latest.mp3, the application allows users to listen to the latest weather, trail and lift reports from the same application. And all of this was done without the development team having to build any additional RSS functionality.

In both cases, we automatically change the filename to a default filename that is set on the system. This ensures that the user experience will be great even when they are searching for the file on their computer! The user experience continues off of the first contact with their sites to every interaction.

I will try and get a screen shot of the banner ad that was produced that re-purposes the podcasts. Even better, I will try to get the actual banner for you to experience!