Web-Based Video Publishing

As the popularity of multimedia content is growing explosively, the companies are more inclined to put such content at their Web resources. This article will brief you on the main approaches to multimedia publishing and provide details on how to configure your own video content delivery infrastructure. Most probably, you have already found yourself in a situation when you needed to publish conference materials or a managerial speech addressed to your employees or customers, on your site. Continue reading

Cloud Computing for Your Business

At many Web entrepreneurship conferences, speakers like to say about a substantially reduced cost of entry at the market, requiring almost zero investments from the entrepreneurs. This is partly due to the popularity of cloud computing, which drastically reduces the initial launch costs. This article describes the main features offered by cloud computing and shares an insight on how to correctly use them. Continue reading

Hulu: Fascinating Facts

Although, of course, the issues of video content delivery cost and Hulu’s business organization often is a matter of discussion.
Current Hulu’s highlights:

  • Hulu develops features to increase relevancy of advertising to the user, thereby enhancing the value of interactive advertising, including choice of ads and voting for ads.
  • The user can preview the ad and then watch the whole episode without interruption.
  • Much attention is given to relevant video recommendations. Hulu recommends videos watched by people with a similar profile and also people viewing the same videos as the user.
  • Compiling a user profile based on viewing history, especially for anonymous users.
  • An option to replace irrelevant advertising with other ads. Advertisers pay much more for the involved customers.

P.S.
One piece of advice from Jason Kilar. The entrepreneur must be more than a little bit crazy. Otherwise, everybody would have already done it.

Here you can see the presentation.

Watch live streaming video from gigaomtv at livestream.com

Comparison of Advertising Systems for Publishers

If you are a Web site owner willing to publish ads at your site, you have a broad choice of advertising systems, and choosing the most preferable one is not so easy. On the Web, there is also lack of analytics to simplify your choice. Even ad servers are seemingly doing everything to obscure the publishers. They provide only generic information on the features, without going into much detail. Moreover, they split their products into several options, although the difference between them is all but evident and not clearly outlined. Also, product names are constantly changing, which affects Web search on them. In this article, we have tried to bring together our own experience and all publicly available information on the most popular ad servers: AdRiver, DoubleClick For Publishers (by Google), and OpenX. Continue reading

Flash Media Server 4: Plug-ins

This article opens a series of publications dedicated to the development of C++ plug-ins for Flash Media Server. Not that we are going to describe all FMS features, but rather to compensate for certain lack of information on C++ plug-in development on vendors’ sites.
The series will cover the following topics:
Part 1: Conceptual overview of FMS architecture
Part 2: RTMP URL tokenization based on authorization plug-in
Part 3: Load balancing using access plug-in Continue reading

HTTP Dynamic Streaming: Configuring Web Server Cluster

Video content is now ubiquitous on the Web, but sometimes user experience leaves much to be desired. We have already discussed here enabling high performance configurations to deliver video content based on Adobe Flash Media Server. Still, sometimes HTTP delivery is more efficient. In this article, we would like to give you an overview of how to build a high performance video delivery system based on NGINX and Apache Web servers. Continue reading

Persons: Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook

This article opens a new series of our publications dedicated to outstanding Web entrepreneurs. While you are reading, we would like you to answer some questions to understand how those people may have influenced your business. Well, it goes without saying that Mark Zuckerberg is a really outstanding personality. He’s one of the youngest billionaires in the world and the CEO of a globally popular Web resource. No wonder that two books were written and one movie was shot about Facebook!
How is Facebook influencing your business, and how can you benefit from this? Continue reading

TechCrunch Moscow 2010: The Bottom Line


TechCrunch safely landed in Moscow.

Recently, Russia’s first TechCrunch event was held in Moscow. TechCrunch is a seminal business venue dedicated to Web based businesses and startups. The event was held in Russia’s first private tech incubator, Digital October, located in the former Krasny Oktyabr (“Red October”) factory building. Not neglected by the Russian governmental authorities, TechCrunch was held up to the global standards. Online video broadcast of all interviews and speeches was delivered. Here I would like to dwell upon the most interesting and memorable of them.
Continue reading

Open Source ActionScript 3 Google Analytics API

We have published sources and all information about recently developed AS3 Google Analytics API. We would like to see you uncovering potential of Google Analytics in your Flash and AIR applications. It is in the early stage of development but already gives you powerful tools of access to analytics data in simple and flexible form. We will continue to develop AS3 Google Analytics API and add new features, that’s why we would like to get your feedback and feature requests. Visit project page. Continue reading