As of March 2011, a total of 187 million iOS devices have been sold – 60 million iPod touch, 19 million iPad and no fewer than 108 million iPhones [1]. According to a recent survey by Silicon Alley, 36% of iPad usage time is devoted to web browsing, and 15% to video consumption – together accounting for over 50% of usage time [2].

Based on these trends, MediaEvent Services have now re-engineered their successful Interactive Webcast interface and added support for the full range of iOS devices. The new interface was successfully launched for the webcast of the Annual General Meeting of Deutsche Lufthansa.

In addition to previous features such as the slide navigation in Coverflow manner (now also supported on Apple Touch devices), a type-ahead search was added, which delivers instant search results with thumbnails as the user types in a search term.

The new iPhone version accounts for the reduced display space and features a full view of the slides along with an audio-only stream – in crystal clear quality. It includes the acclaimed navigation and synchronizes slide and audio content in both live an on-demand modes.

Our new interface supports all major streaming formats (H.264 for Flash Player and iOS, as well as Windows Media), automatically detects the device type as well as the supported video formats and bitrates. The benefit for marketing departments and agencies: They only need to integrate a single HTML link for all devices – it’s as simple as that. The benefit for end users: Playback just works – no technical expertise required, as there is no need to choose a format or bitrate. The new interface selects the ideal formation combination and excels at usability.

Watch the Lufthansa Annual General Meeting 2011

References
[1] Apple Inc.
[2] Silicon Alley Insider

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Our most interesting AWS deployment so far was a Facebook app for the launch of the BOSS Black collection 2010, where 200,000 Facebook fans were invited to apply as a model in the premium fashion show. From thousands of applications, 5 male and 5 female applications were selected via online voting and a jury call and flown to Berlin to show their skills. The contest app needed to sustain the massive traffic from 200,000 fans, provide data storage as well as photo upload capabilities, permit instantaneous scaling of server resources, and provide maximum redundancy.
MES built a solution that extended the MES Content Distribution Network with an application hosting platform as well as redundant database, monitoring and autoscaling capabilities. Hand in hand with the frontend developers of the agency Werbewelt, the campaign was launched within 10 days.

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Hugo Boss, a German heritage brand, delivered one of the most innovative web events of this year as part of the launch of the new BOSS Black collection. Over 200,000 Facebook fans were invited to apply as a model in the premium fashion show. From thousands of applications, 5 male and 5 female contestants were selected via online voting and a jury call and flown to Berlin to show their skills. After three days of casting, fitting, and coaching, two winners lived their dream of sharing the catwalk with international top models.

With only 8 weeks from inception to the day of the show, many organizational hurdles had to be overcome. To handle the applications, a Facebook app was developed that would need to sustain the massive traffic from 200,000 fans, provide data storage as well as photo upload capabilities, permit instantaneous scaling of server resources, and provide maximum redundancy. In parallel, the setup was optimized and audited for performance. Drawing from more than 2.5 years of experience in developing cloud-based, high-availability and high-performance platforms based on Amazon Web Services, MES built a solution that extended the MES Content Distribution Network with an application hosting platform as well as redundant database, monitoring and autoscaling capabilities. Hand in hand with the frontend developers of the agency Werbewelt, the campaign was launched in under 10 days.

The venerable Hamburger Bahnhof zu Berlin provided the ideal setting for the show. The production schedule called for video production from the moment the contestants de-boarded their airplanes up to the fashion show, daily features on Facebook, YouTube and Hugo Boss TV, and finally a livestream of the fashion show. MES set up production infrastructure for the video production agency PUBLICMOTOR that was used to review and edit the material produced by three camera crews on site. Once approved, clips were put into an automatic transcoding pipeline that converted and delivered them to the target platforms (Hugo Boss TV, Facebook, YouTube, iPhone, DVD).

Similarly, clips were produced as live inserts and played out to the OB truck that produced the live feeds for the show. The two-hour live show was produced and encoded on site. A backup satellite feed was set up to MES headquarters in Wetzlar, where additional encoding hardware was ready to take over the live encoding in case of sudden connectivity issues on site. Up until the early morning hours, red carpet interviews, the fashion show, and a backstage feature of the two newly made models were edited and delivered to the distribution channels.

The post Hugo Boss Facebook Model Contest: “My friend, the brand” appeared first on MediaEvent Services.

For the livestream, MES produced 4 hours of exclusive live web content on-location on several floors in the O2 World, starting with a Red Carpet Pre-Show with hosts Joko Winterscheid and Joss Stone, which was played out with a 30 minutes delay to close the gap to the main show. Within the TV ad breaks of the gigantic main show, MES produced the All Access Show with rocker Pete Wentz where stars and starlets got comfortable on a couch and helped themselves at the bar.

For the first time, the EMA web show production ran completely tapeless and was produced in HD 1080i. Signals from Ikegami fiber camera systems, OB feed, video inserts and GFX were mixed and then time shifted and recorded with EVS XT2. In parallel, Final Cut systems were used to produce VOD packages from the EVS live feed, which were then sent to a VOD encoding cluster. This allowed all VOD content for web and mobile to be published as soon as the show finished. The Red Carpet Show was also distributed to video cubes in the O2 World as well as to MTV News for further editing. 8 dual-quadcore live encoding boxes pushed out 16 live streams for Facebook and the local MTV sites via 2 CDNs. At the end of the day, 5 TB of video data were produced and the livestream had accumulated not less than 1.03 million views.

Livestream on mtvema.com

Facebook integration

Shooting of the Backstage Show

Digital Media Production Room

Editing Stations

Director’s Seat

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For the first time, Daimler sends a daily 3-hour livestream from the International Motor Show (IAA) that everyone can participate in. Users post questions, and Daimler’s employees and moderators answer and demonstrate details directly on the vehicle. Banners on the German portals Welt Online and Autobild.de show a preview of the livestream and generate a broad viewership.

The project is a successful collaboration between fischerAppelt (TV-production), Scholz & Volkmer (Web application) and tv-on web/MES (livestream).

The post Bringing technology closer: Daimler IAA Live-Talk appeared first on MediaEvent Services.

Since August, MES puts the weekly live show “MTV Home” on the net for MTV Networks Germany.
MTV Home fans from the Facebook community can directly participate in the show via a live chat with the hosts Joko, Klaas and Palina. Strategic use of Facebook promotion features (events, ads, fan page) provides for optimal coverage. Work can be so much fun!

• MTV Home

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• Watch the show in the HUGO BOSS eMAG

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You can drag the Slideflow using your mouse, or click anywhere in the stack to jump there. Click inside the frame in order to enable mouse wheel and arrow key navigation! Or better yet, try the fullscreen example.

Technical background: The photos and titles are read from an XML file, and the thumbnails are pre-generated using Photoshop actions (included in the download).
03/28/2008: Updated to Slideflow 1.1 – image cropping and gradient direction fixed!

Download Slideflow 1.1 including gallery demo

We’re excited to hear where Slideflow is used, so let us know in the comments!

Credits:

• Based on code by Michael L Perry
• Photoshop actions originally created by Marcus Strehlow
• Photos by Nicholas_T
• Tigra Slider control
• Scriptaculous and Prototype

How to use it in your scripts

The gallery example is a good starting point. Have a look at slideflow.js; we tried to document all important aspects in the code. Initial settings, such as image locations and DOM parent node are passed on initialization. The control exposes a set of methods to change the display at runtime; it provides callbacks to allow the application to react to Slideflow movement and clicks on the center slide. Note that the control requires some specific CSS (slideflow.css) to work.

How to use the Photoshop Actions

You need to run your batch of pictures through the Photoshop actions (originally by Marcus Strehlow) in order to create left, right and center thumbnails. These need to go in different directories, which will later be provided to the control as pathLeft, pathRight and pathCenter.
We opted for Photoshop’s Save for Web feature instead of the regular JPEG export because it delivers far superior quality. Unfortunately, Save for Web doesn’t work well with batches and requires one to manually update the export directories for each of the three Slideflow actions. This can be done by performing the following steps:

1. Create a blank RGB document, or open any RGB image
2. Navigate to the action’s Export command, which is second to last and double-click it
3. The Save for Web dialog opens. Save the blank document in your target folder for the respective action (i.e. left for the left action etc.)
4. If you’re like Tim and like a clean system, you may delete the JPEG you just created

All actions assume 4 : 3 ratio. If pictures have a different ratio, you need to adjust it first, or the thumbnail images will have white edges.

The post AJAX Image Gallery powered by Slideflow (like Cover Flow) appeared first on MediaEvent Services.

The interface leverages AJAX technologies to deliver a rich user experience, including a Slideflow control mimicking the popular Cover Flow navigation, across all major browsers.

It uses the recently released Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 platform to stream to Windows, Mac OS X and Internet Explorer 5, 6 und 7, Firefox 1.5 and 2 as well as Safari. That’s webcasting 2.0.

Update: The platform has since been extended to support Flash video as well!

Some screenshots:

Main screen with slideflow

Help Overlay

Lightbox slide view

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• http://www.mtvema.com

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