Tutorials and helpful tips about software development
If you offer online video services, no doubt you have not once thought of video views analytics. In a Flash-based OSMF framework, there is GTrackPlugin to collect statistics on content viewing. Also, you can also use our OSMF Video Analytics.
However, if your service HTML5 based, you need a purpose designed viewing analytics. To build such a plugin, HTML5 Media API should be used. For more on this API, read this post on HTML5 player implementation. Continue reading
Year by year, we become more involved with media technology than ever before. The World Wide Web is also sensitive to this trend as shown by immense success and popularity of online video services, such as YouTube. However, you cannot run such systems without the technology for video content playback at the end user level.
A classical approach is to build a video player with Flash. Probably you can hardly find a more popular Web browser plugin than Flash Player today. However, a weakness of this approach is the necessity to install the Flash plugin, missing from many devices by default. For example, whatsoever popular iPhone and iPad are, they cannot run Flash applications from within the browser. The way out of this situation is to use HTML5. Continue reading
Today, smart phones and tablets have become integral parts of our daily life. People interact with such devices frequently and lengthly over a day. So, mobile and tablet applications have become important channels for content distribution. Launching of virtually any major service includes ad-hoc application development. Segmentation of mobile applications greatly increases the cost to implement a mobile strategy. Adobe AIR allows you to reduce the cost-to-market for cross-platform services. You can develop your application once and then adapt it easily to a range of devices or screens (also, there’s more dexterous Flash developers on the market than iOS or Android experts). In this article, we’ll dwell on some features regarding development of mobile applications with Adobe AIR. Continue reading
Online video technologies form an essential part of the Web today. New services and platforms are constantly emerging. By developing multimedia Adobe Flash applications based on OSMF, you can focus directly on user experience rather than multimedia content handling algorithms. Recently, Adobe has issued a new version of OSMF 2.0 multimedia framework. This post is focused on the essential innovations of the latest release. Generally speaking, OSMF 2.0 is the foundation of most of modern video players that ensures uniformity of their design. Continue reading
Today, almost every video content site is using inline advertising. However, no one would bother to say today of some upcoming massive shift from Adobe Flash Player to alternative solutions. Still, the HTML5 <video> tag is evidently becoming a matter of growing interest. Hence the issue of enabling advertising in the new context is emerging. Here we will show you a sample code of HTML5 video VAST plug-in to enable ads with a "clean" <video> tag. Continue reading
Over the last few years, the multimedia technology has been growing exponentially. Twenty years ago, the analog over-the-air broadcast was the top experience available. Now, online video services make an increasing impact on the TV industry. You will find useful DRM technologies overview in this article (I hope). It was published in the latest issue of Russian magazine Telesputnik. Continue reading
Adobe’s recent announcement of a new Flash platform strategy for mobile devices have created quite a stir in the industry. The reason for this is the communications gap and misunderstanding which has been primarily caused by Adobe itself. Subsequent Adobe’s explanations have dispelled many fears and exaggerations perpetrated by tabloids. In this post, we’ll look at future developments and their impact on the online video projects. Continue reading
Launching of large-scale online video portals requires a great deal of precision and accuracy at the design stage. In addition to complex infrastructure of a Web platform (the portal itself), we have to deal with a no less complex infrastructure video platform (as content delivery is only part of the platform). In this post, we will discuss some of the important principles of online video service design that we have learned over the five years of working on similar projects. Continue reading
