Live Pace Car Unveiling

The Live show for the Pace Car announcement went off very well. The day before we did a test run with all of the equipment and internet connectivity. I have to say this was one of the few times I have arrived and the connectivity was already set up and working. This rarely happens.

The setup was done at the Indianapolis Convention Center for the 2008 Indy Auto Show. One cameraman was used with a direct line for audio.

One new thing we did was encode the show using a laptop instead of using the larger HP rack mounted servers.

It was exciting to see two Chevrolet Corvettes that will serve as Official Pace Cars for the 2008 Indianapolis 500: A Z06 E85 concept model and a 30th anniversary commemorative edition.

Thanks for everybody who watched the show!

Competing With Free

If you don’t have a wealthy niche market will use your subscription model to turn a decent profit for Live Events, then you are like the remaining 99% of us. If you want to get your product out to the masses and grow your customer base you have to show your event for FREE.

I can hear the moans and groans about costs. “How on earth can I afford this?” There are many ways to start looking at it. The cost will be less than what you think these days.

As always I will give you some examples of what I have experienced in this space. We use to have a subscription model to show the races for the Indy Racing League and the Indianapolis 500. The subscription model was mediocre at best. It quickly dawned on me that you can’t grow your customer base if you charge them for it. Fans won’t be able to share, comment or tell others “Hey click on this link and watch this with me”. That viral communication was instrumental in giving us the success we have today. The following year I found a company that had an ad supported player so we could begin the process of showing this to our fans for free. We did some trials with the wonderful members at TrackForum (A racing forum). They helped us worked out some bugs and continue to give us help to this day. The results were incredible. I was more impressed with the number of racing fans watching that were outside of our current fan base. This was the objective but didn’t expect immediate results. We then allowed fans to discover our site and participate in various other 2.0 applications. Needless to say our traffic increased over 100%.

-- Try to gauge the size of what your online audience will be. Consultants tend to dramatically overestimate this number to drive the costs up. Try things live posting audio or video clips up on your site. Check your stats on how many times that clip was downloaded over the course of a week. This will give you a good basis. I have used this method for years and have been within 10% each time. Your number may range from a few 100 to 10,000. (If you are over 100,000 and aren’t showing your product for free call me as you are missing a huge opportunity for growth).

-- The costs of streaming has dropped significantly over the past few years and will continue to drop thanks to P2P development. There are numerous streaming companies in this space. I currently work with WhiteBlox, Akamai, Limelight and Abacast. All have great solutions depending on your needs.

-- Advertisement. Obviously the only way to keep it free is to have an ad supported model. Advertisers want to know who your audience is so gather as much information about them as you can. This will be critical when presenting it to potential advertisers. Your fans actually enjoy relevant online advertisement and will engage with the ad.

-- Sell your event by the minute. When you set up your charges use the Cost Per Viewer Minute Model. This model is best for the advertiser and they will thank you for not overselling your product which happens all to much in the traditional media world. Basically advertisers will purchase how many minutes they want to sponsor with the option of buying more minutes. So if a fan only watches 30 minutes of your show then the advertisers only pays to those minutes viewed and nothing more. If not all minutes are viewed it can be applied to your next show or they get a refund.

-- Video cameras. Depending on what type of show you are putting on (a tech seminar or the Indy 500) lighting is going to be the key. Your cameraman will give you the best advice on this.

-- Audio. Make sure you have a good audio source. I can’t you how important it is to have good audio as users will become quickly annoyed if they can barely make out your program.

We had a great 2007 season and 2008 will be even better.

Take Down The Barriers

Data collection from users is an important goal for companies. What most companies forget to acknowledge is that people don’t want to give them personal information. Forrester research says that 87% of users will click away rather than view the information they are seeking when asked to give personal information. That is an enormous hurdle to overcome. I call this the Barrier Effect.

What companies fail to do is look at it from the consumer perspective. Even if you have a wonderful product or are showing a great live event, why would you put up barriers that the customer has to overcome? The response from companies is that we need to get information from the users. I completely understand that but here is what they are missing. The hardcore users will sign up because they have a passion for your product. Great but more than likely you already have their name in your email lists, giveaway lists, promotional lists, etc… Here is what you are missing and it is a big one. Your NEW customers.

Here is the scenario for the casual customer. A friend blasts out an email to a bunch of their friends that says “Hey check this out”. Wonderful, your Online dept should be proud because they have empowered a fan and that fan shares this information with their friends. By the way, approval from a friend is still the most powerful way to market your product on the internet. Once this potential new user gets to the page they are greeted by a Barrier. To add insult to this they are asked to give personal information before they can have the ‘privilege’ to see your product. As you can imagine this goes over like a lead balloon. This is where traditional marketing needs a wakeup call. It is hard enough in this new age to get people to your site. Why put up barriers once they get there.

Let me give you a real world example. When we were showing FREE live practice for the Indianapolis 500 during May we required users to register. We had a good amount of people sign up. This number leveled off after a week. After sending out many emails to casual fans to find out how they liked watching, the vast majority said they didn’t want to take the time to fill out the registration and give us their personal info. This was a real wakeup. The people who signed up were our hardcore fans. I quickly realized we would never be able to grow or even show our product to the casual customer when they are just one click away from the next form of entertainment. I quickly remove the registration for the second week of practice and viewer ship shot up over 400% the next day. Growth was over 100% each of the following days. It was truly amazing once we removed the barriers to get to the very product we are selling.

Based on my earlier results if users really wanted to view our content they would normally type in fake information and click on survey answers that would quickly get them to the content. Needless to say this would skew any accurate data we were trying to learn about our customers.

The challenge has become to figure out a way to gather data without making it intrusive for the customer. I set out emailing colleagues and friends basically ask them what can I do to get your personal information. The answer is surprisingly simple. You have to earn the trust of the customer. For example, I am a big believer in Apple Computers and their products. Along the way they have earned my trust as a company. It is the only company that I have given my personal email address to so they can basically spam me with the products. This was the same answer I received from various colleagues.

The next step was taking down all barriers and having users opt in to give data. The information has been more accurate because people volunteer the information. The data gathered came from less people but it was more accurate. The next step was to figure out how to gather more data. This has come from implementing various social media applications. When users start participating socially on the site, you start earning a certain level of trust if you don’t put up any Barriers. This means people can post information anonymously or under aliases. Usually about 60-90 days of participation the data collection grows dramatically. You start to earn the trust of the user and they in turn will provide you the data you are requesting.

Data Collectors Are Getting Worse

I have been hard on Online Data Collectors and won't be letting up anytime soon. Online Data Collectors are modern day telemarketers. There is nothing more annoying than trying to do something as simple as vote on a poll and be required to register your personal information. Once these data collectors get your info, you know you will be spammed until your 1 GIG mailbox fills up.

I understand the need to collect some personal data to help companies better serve the customer. The reality is that most instances only require a suggestion box. This suggestion box would require companies to actually sit down and address these issues. Instead, we get spammed into oblivion with opportunities to purchase hats and t-shirts.

Companies need to learn that they have to earn our trust. Over time, we will slowly give some personal information voluntarily. The information you receive from these customers will help your company. It is hard work but the rewards are well worth it.

Cyber Monday says who?

The Monday after the Thanksgiving has taken on the name Cyber Monday for online shoppers. By most accounts, this year has been the best to date for online retailers. Online shoppers are broken down into two categories.

The first is category is the traditional shopper. Cyber Monday is more for traditional consumers that brave the long early lines to get the best deals. They actually will shop for their gifts during the weekend getting all the deals they can. Then come Monday they will check out the deals online for merchandise they couldn’t get in the brick and mortar stores.

The second category is for the non traditional shopper and the crowd hater. This shopper is still looking for the great deals but isn’t about to stand in line to find out each store only has 3 ‘deal’ items per store.

For the last few years, we have seen an increase of deals exploiting this day for great savings. Amazon.com did a ridiculous promo that had you ‘vote’ on an item for a good deal over 6 days. Each day you would go back only to find out you didn’t get that deal. By the sixth day of Amazon telling you that you are a complete loser, you start to resent them. My guess is they wanted to make you have the same feeling as people who waited 6 hours in line for a Wii only to find out you didn’t get it.

I see the online ecommerce trend encroaching onBlack Friday. Why give your customer a chance to spend their money elsewhere and not with you. Walmart had exclusive online deals on black Friday. I thought this was a good move to hit their customers a chance to do both.

We did the same thing at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway store. We turned on our holiday store the day before Thanksgiving followed with an email to give people something to talk about when discussing all of the other deals. The number of items ordered started to increase on Thursday. Interestingly enough, we had a huge spike in the number of customers visiting the site on Saturday.

Next year, look for more online retailers turning Black Friday in "Blow out Deal Friday" for everybody.

NBC Direct Beta

NBC Universal has been going all out creating new ways to get their content online with Hulu.com, NBC.com and now NBC Direct. I have been fortunate enough to be a beta tester for these new applications. While NBC plans to use many platforms to make their content available including iTunes, the move by NBC is essentially driven by the desire to cut out the middle man and deal directly with the viewer. By the end of the year, NBC Universal will be hitting online consumers from every direction.

NBC Direct allows you do download an entire show to your computer. Finally, portable no cost content from the networks has arrived. (It is important to note that NBC does not require you to give any personal data or even an email address. Kudos to them for figuring this out.)

Once you start to view a show, you have 48 hours to view it as many times as you want. After that the video will expire. All videos in the “select a video” are available for 7 days. After that they will expire regardless of when the show was downloaded or renewed. All of these rules sound absurd? Well they are. NBC is trying to find that fine line between controlling the rights and mass media online distribution.

They have created what amounts to Tivo-To-Go but have attached strings to it. 48 hours seems a little much but we all know that will change shortly.

Based on early reports, NBC used three development companies to create this application. ExtendMedia did the interface, YuMe sells the ads and Pando Networks is doing the P2P distribution.

Technical issues. NBC Direct uses Windows Media Player 11 so you are always greeted with a link to upgrade to the lasted security or DRM fix from outside of the player. Hopefully this will be resolved once beta development is over.

Now for the breakdown of the player:

• No timeline in the player unless you go full screen. Very odd oversight.
• Intrusive ads. NBC figured it out in Hulu.com so why put pre rolls in portable content?
• Decent video quality. VCR quality playback in the video. Very impressive.
• No social aspect. Hulu.com has a number of web 2.0 apps in it so why are they all left out here?
• No small portable video player. Maybe NBC thinks that most users will want to view this on a plane or in a car. The flexibility for portable media to be just that seems to have been overlooked here.
• Two tabs – Select a video and My videos. Nice straight forward information panels.
• Small Ad banner. The player has a small ad banner in the lower left that oddly enough doesn’t work when you click on it.
• Nice clean player design. All of the controls are straight forward and you don’t have to go digging just to start a show.
• Does not work in FireFox

All in all NBC Direct addresses the video on the go market. This is a growing segment in the industry. Even with all of the minor glitches and insulting regulations, it is good to see a network moving in this direction. NBC has made another great leap forward with Hulu.com. Once they combine the two, NBC will be the leader in the race for online viewership.

Going HD Online

Next year the Indy Racing League will broadcast all of their events in HD. This is going to be a huge leap forward for our broadcast. What does this mean for our live online shows? We will be broadcasting in the 16x9 ratio for our online video streaming. I am working through a number of technical issues right now.

The signal we will be receiving into our encoders will be HD SDI as compared to analog from last year. The quality we will be putting out online will be significantly better.

On the downside, there will be a couple of things we will need to work out. We won’t be showing the picture in true HD right off the bat. The bandwidth to stream that out would be more than what we will have available and the reality is how many users will opt for this. If enough users request it, we will show it. If we show the stream using Flash (I am still deciding between Silverlight and Flash), there will be down sampling to get to the 400k stream. The final picture will be better than the analog 400k stream and we will be able to increase the bit rate as needed because the higher quality video will be there. For the Indianapolis 500, I will be looking at ways to get out an HD stream for select users to test.

Autosportradio.com

I was fortunate enough to be on Don Kay’s Autosportradio.com show. Don Kay is an avid IndyCar fan who has a long history following the Indianapolis 500, IndyCar and the Indy Pro Series. Don is among the few that have a vast knowledge of the IndyCar history.

What is impressive is how quickly Don has adapted to the internet to get his message out. For his live audio show Don uses the Wavestreaming server (wavestreaming.com) with a 24k bitrate. Dial up is used to connect connect to wavestreaming.com.

For video, Don records his digital video camera to record the show. Don understands how important lighting is and has a good portable lighting system in place. After the show, the video is edited and uploaded to his site in wmv format. He understands the need for quick turnaround.

In the future Don plans on doing his show using video live. Because his current setup has been working for on demand video, the transition to live video will only require server connections. Don who knows enough to be dangerous on the internet has done an outstanding job creating a live show on the internet for his fans to enjoy.

Don has a great archive of legendary racers and people who are involved in the industry. This list will only grow due to Don Kay’s enthusiasm for the sport.

Don has been doing some great things for indycar.com which I will cover in depth in a future post.

Thanks for having me on the show!

Helio Castroneves Wins It All

I was shocked to watch Helio win the disco ball trophy for Dancing with the Stars. I really thought it would be Marie Osmond in spite of that rather frightening dance towards the end.

His victory lead to our biggest spike on indycar.com in visits since Sept 13^th. The Indy Car Series had its final race Sept 9^th. We were able to give this new audience a place to talk about the dancing everyday.

'Helio Castroneves' was the number two keyword for the month from search engines.

The next opportunity will be to see how we can turn this new fan base into IndyCar fans.

Helio Viewing Party

Last night, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway put on a viewing party to watch Dancing with the Stars. A few hundred screaming Helio fans showed up to root him on and to vote.

Online voting stations were set up so the fans could cast their votes. We looked at various ways to do a live online preshow party but couldn't put together a quality show. The challenge in the future will be to work on ways to bring these fans together in some sort of live forum that would include video, chats, photos, etc... I hope to have most of these challenges addressed in 2008.
It was a huge success and gave us our best day for 'Visits' in November.

Hopefully he will win tonight.

Keyword “Helio Castroneves”

Helio is receiving a tremendous amount of media exposure for his success of Dancing with the Stars. Recently he was on the cover of TV Guide along with the other finalist. People named him in the Annual "Sexiest Man Alive" issue.

Helio and Julianne were also on Larry King Live and The Ellen DeGeneres Show. This has been great name recognition for Helio and people have been going to search sites like Google to learn more about him. IndyCar.com comes up 3^rd right after his official website and the wikipedia entry on Google. The power of search engines have sent us plenty of visitors.

According to our Google Analytics, the premiere of the show was our best day for the keyword Helio Castroneves. Dig a little deeper and those users have been spending as much as 20 minutes on indycar.com. With over 80% being “New Visits” this has given us a great opportunity to introduce these new visitors to our product.

This strategy has been working well. Our ‘visits’ have been growing week to week because he is in the spotlight.

Traditional Meets Non Traditional in the Conference Room

How often have you heard something like this in a conference room. “Let’s create a video about our product put it on our site. Then new customers will sign up to see this cool video so we can collect all of their data. It will be all over the internet by the end of the week.”

You look out across the conference room and you can see three battle groups form instantly. This is a passionate media so nobody is about to back down. The battle lines are drawn by the three groups -- cup holders, leather binders and scratchpads.

The first thing you notice is, how online developers all close their eyes and you can see them biting their tongues. You can see these geeks trying to formulate the politically correct words to say “You are a complete idiot.”

The Marketing battle line forms with glee and joy about how this new campaign will just be a huge hit. The online customer will flock by the billions and give all of their personal information just to see this new company clip. Victory is just one step away! The high fives are going on everywhere and the latest buzz words are flowing. The company has been saved!

The last group is upper management. At first they are hearing all the right buzz words and some even jump in with examples of how other companies put their video on YouTube and they are very successful. Most of the people in this group start to sense a divide and remain silent. Finally with tepid discretion, a senior member will venture out on the limb and ask one of the online nerds why they aren’t jumping around like monkeys in a cage.

First Blood.

The normally beat down online developer will start out agreeing that using online video is a great thing and it is good to see the company is going in this direction. BUT. By accident, Marketing has but the online developer in a position to draw first blood. Good move by them. So here we go. The defensive nerd says “Just because you build it doesn’t mean they will come. Also, why are you having them sign up to view our product?” Valid questions but you might has well tossed a match on the ethanol.

“I knew it.” screams the marketing pro that has spent 30 minutes before this meeting coming up with this brilliant idea. “You internet guys don’t want to work with us. You don’t understand what we need to do to get more customers.” “If you guys would just do what we say then we will be the most successful company around”. The offensive attack has begun.

The upper management group watches as this entrenched battle begins in shock. They start reaching for their battle weapon the infamous BlackBerry. Getting the hell out of this meeting is their goal to victory. One by one, they leave because of more important meetings that must be attended. Oh sweet victory! Within minutes, the last one exists with the precision of a Tamohac missle.

Now at the table are just the traditional marketing folks and the online staff. These are two groups that should really never live in the same city let alone be in the same room. Traditional marketing people have grown up with TV and print their whole lives doing wonderful marketing campaigns and know what practices works best. My hat goes off to them. What they can’t accept or even remotely realize is very few if any of these traditional media rules apply to this new medium.

This medium is about the user controlling the experience. It is that simple. Most of all, they don’t want to be marketed too or be feed lines of PR nonsense. Imagine telling that to seasoned professionals. It doesn’t set well.

The biggest loser in this battle is your customer.

Helio Castroneves is in the Finals!

Helio Castroneves made it to the finals on Dancing with the Stars. Traffic to indycar.com has increased each week as he continues to progress. Social activity increases as well on his section: http://www.indycar.com/community/dancingwiththestars/

Comparing to the previous Monday and Tuesday stats, visits were up 5.8%, Pageviews up 9.4%, time on site up 8.4% and new visits up 2.7%.

Next week is the last show. We have had great success in signing up new members for our my indycar.com site. Participation has been the key for our increase across the board. We allow users to do as much or little as they want.

The only missing component has been adding a live element to this. We were really close to adding one but it wasn’t a good fit. I look forward to the results from next weeks show.

I have been a beta tester for the site Hulu.com. The much hyped joint venture between NBC and Fox. I have been looking forward to being a beta tester.

Here is my brief overview. Hulu is the on demand long form media website done right (almost). Hulu.com understands that people who consume internet media do so in a different way than people who watch traditional TV. YouTube was the first to understand this concept but it looks like this will be their first true competitor in this space. Professional content distributed to the masses with no barriers is what internet users are demanding. From a functional standpoint, Hulu has done their homework and created an easy to use video application. The entire site is straightforward and you can quickly get to what you want to watch. There is nothing to download and it is as simple as click to watch.

What Hulu understands is how the lean forward audience watches online media. This consumer wants to control the entire experience. Hulu embraces the open social concept but stops short. While the user gets to control just about everything, the users hands are tied once it comes to group socialization.

Hulu does a great job with various distribution options. The most powerful form of distribution is that the user doesn’t have to watch the content on the Hulu.com site. Finally somebody gets it. Companies are starting to realize they should not control the entire experience and to let the user share this content the way they want. The result is a user that will want even more of your content.

What we are finally seeing is the transformation to an open system of video distribution.

The content provided is not bad. Obviously, NBC and Fox’s lineup are a great start and they go a little farther. Shows from FX, Sci Fi, Sundance, Fuel TV, E, Bravo and USA Networks. Even a selection from Universal fills out the list.

Unfortunately Hulu will only make the most recent five episodes of the current series available. I believe this will quickly change. Would NBC rather me watch an older episode of the Office or give me the opportunity to go elsewhere? It is hard enough to attract a user. Why give them a reason to leave.

-- I took a screen shot of the The Office so you can see what it looks like.

Breakdown of the options:

Flash – Streamed using Flash 9 using H.264. Quality is pretty good.

Navigation – This is another highlight. You don’t have to drag that slider around to find what you are looking for. The timeline shows a line in it

Share – It has the typical email to a friend form. What is interesting is you can resize the clip to only what you want the person to see. It also gives you the ability to preview what you are resizing before sending it out. Good concept.

Feedback – Let’s you report problems for the player or show.

Comments are great. I am glad they don’t censor out the negative comments. Makes it real.

Full Screen – On the full-screen mode, the video quality was sharp without stuttering (480kbps or 700kbps depending on your bandwidth.) You can leave comments under the player.

Pop Out – This is one of the major keys to the success of Hulu. You can have the video pop up in a separate small window and view it while working on other stuff. This is a great feature not even done by the standard of online video YouTube.

Embed -- The embed feature is a very important step forward for online distribution. You can embed their shows right on your webpage. We knew this was going to happen one day and it is good to see NBC and Fox make this leap first. I copied the code and put it right on a Blog. It was seamless and the mini player is great. This is what we need to focus on for 2008.

Details – Gives you all of the information about the show.

Rate – The typical 5 star click to rate system.

Advertisements. –Thankfully no prerolls. The worst form of advertisement is prerolls. The idea is to adjust the amount of advertising to the length of the clip. But in the end, of course, the ads will be much less intrusive and not as lengthy as TV. Also, when you click on the ad it is a popup window. The vast majority of us have popup blocker so we don’t see the ad. This bug I am sure will be fixed in the future.

Bugs – There are still some bugs when using FireFox. For example you can’t scroll between clips. Kinda a bummer but you can easily get around it.

All in all, Hulu is a very slick video presentation site with a good variety of TV shows to start. I’d rather watch a NBC or Fox show on Hulu than the respective networks’ sites — Hulu’s user experience is better, and everything loads and plays very quickly. Beyond that, Hulu is lacking user uploads, downloads and complete social networking applications. Hulu has raised the bar for internet video delivery and the users will be the winners.

Coming Full Circle

Just over 2 years ago we (a group of online developers) took a very unpopular route. We decided to embrace social media. We wanted to let people share and talk about their favorite topics. At the time the buzz word Web 2.0 was few and far between but described what we were trying to do.

We took the first step in creating an way for users to download free templates of cars and hopefully (fingers crossed) they would design them. The application was set up so they could upload them back to the site. We set up a rating system so other users could rate the cars. We put a lot on the line for this new concept because it was considered very risky. Imaging allowing competitors logos being on your website was one of the reason not to do it. The concept went going over like a lead balloon and we could see the pink slips on the wall. We decided to stick to our guns because we believed the site belongs to the fans and crossed our fingers. The web application went live on Friday quietly so only the fans would see it.

The forums picked up on this feature immediately and it was all over the place. Negative and positive comments were posted. I knew we had a very short time to show this as a success or I would be in serious trouble quickly. The next day a few images were posted. I was thrilled but knew that wasn’t a compelling story if this was going to be all. Then things really started to pick up on Sunday. People were spending all weekend creating these elaborate cars. The quality was second to none. I couldn’t believe it. People from all over the world were putting their favorite products on cars and showing them off to the world. Thankfully it was a huge success in such a short time. (A big Thank You to the fans)

We immediately decided to build upon this be giving the fans a voice. They were allowed to comment on the cars and talk about their experiences. It was great.

To make a long story short, we had thousands of artist uploading designs and hundreds of thousands viewing and rating the designs.

A forward thinking company stepped forward and wanted to participate with this new community. Honda wanted to give the fans a chance to actually create and design an Indy Racing League Safety Car. Honda is giving the opportunity for fans to show everybody what a Safety Car should look like. It will be interesting to see what designs come out of this.

I believe Honda will get more out of this than any campaign that would cost millions. They will have thousands of people downloading their very product and spend countless hours designing on it. Then millions of users will spend hours rating, commenting and discussing these designs. What a huge opportunity for Honda. The Honda Accord will be burned into millions of peoples heads because Honda understands their customers. Honda and potential new customers will both benefit from this type of advertising.

Honda is letting the customers own their product and by doing so we have come full circle.

Repurposing Content on the Web is a Lost Opportunity

How many times have you been told, “Hey just put this or that on the website.” Those are the very comments that make online developers cringe in disbelief. There is so much repurposed content on the internet. I can’t believe the number of missed opportunities.

For example, why do the local news stations show clips from the 6 PM news? Just watching the same clip from TV on the internet is not going to do it. Why not show interviews from local viewers, take requests from your audience, show more live events to catch the moment. To me the evening news is just a repackaged highlight program that rarely gives you the depth of information you want. (Actually newspaper websites are in a great position to take on the local TV stations for live local in depth coverage over the coming years but they don’t realize it yet.).

If you are repurposing content from traditional media outlets to your website, you may notice that viewers are disappointed. Worse your customers don’t come back as frequently because they see through your thinly veiled attempt to push the half hearted attempt onto the internet.

Traditional media is a one way push and most content created for TV and print is created for this medium. The internet is a two way conversation with your customer with the customer controlling the conversation. The content has to be created or reworked to engage your audience.

Here are an examples of what we have done if you need ideas:

We have a Fan Photo section on indycar.com. This section allows users to upload their photos from the race they attend. They can share messages about their experiences at the events with others. Other fans, comment with similar reactions and engage the users. This section has led to one user getting his photo chosen to be on the cover for the 92^nd running of the Indianapolis 500 ticket. I can’t imagine any campaign more engaging to your audience than to honor them for attending.

These is an example of a basic Web 2.0 application that when planned up front will be very successful. This will have far greater impact than any traditional marketing campaign because you will see instant results and more importantly instant feedback.

Hybrid CDNs for Live Media

Probably one of the most interesting things going on in online distribution is the P2P movement. One of the reasons for the push is the cost savings. According to Abacast, using Windows Media Server for live events can save you over 50% in CDN costs. That is a huge savings for companies like us putting on large live events for the masses.

The second push for it is the quicker response time for the end user. Users will be able to get the content quicker using the P2P network. In the future, using a P2P network will be to help offset any concerns about clogging networks especially with more people wanting to view live content in HD.

I am still working through a couple of concerns. I am being told that the current live Flash Media encoded files don’t work on a P2P system. This is an issue that must be corrected. Maybe with the next upgrade to the Flash server this will be changed. The other concern is the acceptance of users installing P2P applications on their personal computer. It appears P2P applications are becoming more acceptable with consumers but has not reached critical mass at this time.

My plan is to move our live shows to a P2P system for the 2008 year. This transition will be based on how Flash works on that system. The next Flash upgrade is expected to run on the P2P applications which can't come soon enough. Hopefully Adobe will lower the cost of Flash streams as well. If not, I can see companies like us and many others making the transition to Silverlight in the not to distant future.

Treating the Online Customer Like Idiots.

How many times have you sat in meetings about a good marketing idea. Then when that plan turns to the internet, the discussion about the customer goes from treating them like 1^st graders. They have to be hand held, told what to do, what to think, and oh by the way; buy, buy, buy our product.. It is enough to make the online developers go crazy.

I feel like it is the online developer's job to protect the online customer from Marketing.. The hardest part is to explain that the online user is the same person standing in line with you at Best Buy. They are a smart and savvy group that quickly knows how to separate the BS from what is authentic. Plus they will use the power of the internet and expose your product for what it is.

Just because your customer doesn’t have a face, doesn’t mean you should treat them like they are idiots. It is important to give them a easy to follow road map with guidelines. Let them discover your site and product. Along the way hear what they have to say. Give them the tools to participate along the way.

This is the new media and make sure we continue to understand our customers. I believe your online customer is your best customer. Make sure you treat them like they are.

Aviation Nation -- LIVE

The live event Aviation Nation at Nellis Air Force Base was a well produced and thought out show. It had a good preshow program which was just for the web. As you know, most shows just turn on the camera 30 min before with no audio. I have even done that years ago.

They had a really cool cockpit cam that was a cool addition. It is always fun to watch from a different perspective to see the pilot’s reaction and point of view. It quickly made me realize how tough it is to be a pilot. The interviews by the judges had good camera angles as well as various shots from around the base. Glad to see it was a professionally produced piece for the website. This made the video viewing experience better than most live events made for just the internet. The video of old aircraft shows were even more engaging. You couldn’t help but be drawn into the show watching the various aircraft.

The interactive chat added a great element of immersion. Conversing with others of like interest is what gives online video the best experience. Hearing from some experts was key. This gave me an insight into more behind the scenes of what pilots have to go through.

On the technical side, I had the opportunity to talk to the folks who put on the show. There was only one minor issue during setup with connectivity. Once that was corrected, everything ran smooth for the rest of the event.

Helio Success on DWTS spurs social activity

The Helio Castroneves Dancing with the Stars section has been a great feature for indycar.com. Each week more and more users are watching videos and posting comments on the site.

It would be great to show the dances live or event archived shows but the networks haven't realized the value or internet distribution at this time.

Compared to the previous week, users are spending more time in this section http://www.indycar.com/community/dancingwiththestars/ of the site. More importantly, users are interacting with the comments, threads , ratings, etc. There are only two shows left so it will be interesting to follow the growth for this section of the site.

userplane

The Userplane applications for online communities is a very interesting concept. I like the idea of creating open applications that can be dropped into websites. This has been a trend for online developers and a good one.

I am specifically talking about the Webchat 2 app that they have out. It has an instant install which is a good way for a fairly quick deployment on the site. The application is free to use but is ad driven. It is nice to see that the advertisement isn’t intrusive as so many ‘free’ applications are these days. They also offer a version where the ads can be taken out but you have to pay.

After doing an installation, the process is pretty straight forward. You quickly have a pop up webchat complete with Profiles, Webcams, etc. A robust chat.

For our needs, the integrated minichat are going to be best suited. To make the chat more fluid it needs to be part of the website and not a popup application. At this point, we are still working on adding this feature. Hopefully we can get it integrated into the site. This would serve most sites better.

Red Bull Indianapolis GP Site to go Web 2.0+

With the announcement of the Red Bull Indianapolis GP coming to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, we have been hard at work planning the new site. We are currently in the early stages of development for the new site. This will be the first of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway sites to go Web 2.0. This is great news going forward and I believe this site will give motorcycle enthusiasts a home to share their experiences.

The development cycle will be cut by over 50% since we have already created a number of 2.0 applications for indycar.com. This leaves us to build out the architecture and start migrating the other applications over.

This site will be using a number of Flash components. We have already started to make the conversion to Flash elements on all sites over the past 6 months so I don’t anticipate any development concerns on that end.

The goal is to have the site up and running by the first of the year.

Dancing With Helio

The Dancing with the Stars show with Helio Castroneves has given indycar.com a nice boost in traffic for October/November. Compared to last October visits are up 28.73%, pageviews up 42.04% and average time on site is up 14.38%. For October the Dancing with the Stars landing page is the most popular outside of the homepage. Now that is Heliomania! No doubt that trend will continue for November.

The growth has been attributed to a couple of Web 2.0 applications. The post a comment has over 60 pages of users leaving comments for Helio and Julianne. By allowing users to comment on the photos, audio and video clips, this keeps users engaged with Helio and keeps track of his progress. This has led to creating everything from wallpapers to ecards and even opening it up to user submitted art.

The longer Helio stays on the show, the more traffic we are seeing on the site. The number of fans watching the show who never would have has been impressive. This shows how viral components quickly spread.

The only thing I am stumped about is the lack of viral elements from ABC. No video is allowed to be used. How odd is that? What a missed opportunity for ABC to capture even more fans. Live video of a 15 minute workout or just highlights would keep fans engaged everyday instead of just the Monday/Tuesday shows. Sites like ours are following the show week in and week out with no content from ABC. We are even restricted to TWO photos a week. Come on. ABC has done a great job of getting their content on the internet but like the rest of the broadcasters has been slow to understand the true power of the internet.

We continue to send a large number of fans to Vote For Helio to ABC.com. It will be interesting to see what kind of traffic we will receive if he makes it to the end. Keep on voting!

Streaming Media West Wrap Up

The 2007 Streaming Media Conference definitely took a change this year. The yearly battle cry of the large networks not understanding why this is a great medium to now they are actually streaming their content on the web . The focus this year was on business models for advertisements to new ways to deliver content.

Content delivery has been an issue in the past but with the recent decreases in CDN costs has enabled just about anybody to take advantage of this medium. P2P will even further lower the costs despite what the speaker at Akamai claimed at the Streaming Media conference.

Advertisement will be the backbone to start paying for this media. Developments from Flash players to CPM’s are being discussed at length. The key is understanding that traditional business rules do not apply to this media and should not be used. These traditional ways are setting back the true growth of online video. It is up to online developers to keep developing better ways for advertisement to be put in place.

One of the mistakes being made is the insertion of pre roll ads. I don’t think I have talked to one person who enjoyed sitting through a 15 second ad spot to view a 30 second clip. More important is how this discourages users from clicking on another clip and who can blame them.

It is important to note that users understand, enjoy and know how important advertisement is because it keeps the content free. What has shown some early signs of success are overlays. When done properly, this provides a good experience for the user and the advertiser. What hasn’t been created are rules as to how much real estate is acceptable. I have seen as much as 50% of the screen covered which completely took away from the experience.

One the CPM front for video, the best model so far has been the viewer minute cost. This is a good model for the advertiser as well as the content creator. This model only charges the advertiser when a user watches the content. The better the content you have the more users that will engage with it.

This year there will be a number of new concepts for advertisement. I will even be trying new ways to get advertisers more exposure with our product and will let you know how these practices are working.

Once some basic advertisement business rules are in place, there will be an explosion in online video advertisement and more quality video .

Streaming Media

I have been at the Streaming Media conference which has always been one of the best conferences to attend for a Live Media developer. IIt is good to see the various aspects that make Live Media so incredibly interactive, starting to come together.

One of the most notable changes this year at the conference is the abrupt change in attitude with broadcasters and content producers. Just last year, content producers were going the way of the music industry. They were heading down the path of trying to control every aspect of their content instead of letting the end user control it. It is good to see this shift in thinking. Of course, the competition in content has forced them down this path.

The shift of content producers thinking about creating content for the internet first, instead of an afterthought is going to produce new and exciting content. When the user gets to enjoy their favorite program the way they want, it puts the broadcaster back in the drivers seat.

I will give an overview of other topics shortly.

NFL and No Live Video

As more sporting leagues are engaging a new audience or trying to provide a better experience for the fans, some sporting leagues are falling behind. The NFL is one that seems to be threading the needle.

The NFL has a great live Flash animation on their website during games. It gives good information and has plenty of data about each player. My hat goes off to the developers that create and maintain this application.

The question is why not show the live video? I was so disappointed that I couldn’t see any games on Sunday because of work. I had internet access and could watch an infinite amount of content but no live video from any games. Of course, the answer is going to come down to digital rights by the network. This is not good for the fans, networks or League. If the network owns the rights to the video, then they need to showcase it on their website.

If the concern is viewership will take away from local affiliates, that couldn’t be further from the truth. The solution is to allow those affiliates to showcase the game live on their local website. This will give affiliates an opportunity to engage local online communities and offer the opportunity to sell more advertisement.

Keep in mind, that if the users can’t access your content they will turn to something else.

CDNs and Live Events

I have been using number of CDNs over the last 5 years and they have been great at off setting server loads for sites that update information throughout the day. When it comes to live events there are some issues that need to be worked out for developers of Live Media.

The example I have been working on with CDNs is the Indy Racing Leagues live timing and scoring application. Over the past few years we have had an HTML version which had a TTL set to less than 10 seconds. The CDNs server would check our T&S server based on the time specified and determine what data had changed. If any images had changed that CDN would distribute out the correct image. If the data had changed, the CDN would then send the request from the user back to our servers to fulfill. This defeated the purpose of using the CDNs to offload continuous live data distribution to their servers and put it back on us. After four years of trying to work out different solutions with various CDNs we have moved on to another solution. This has been an issue for all live events that are pushing out a lot of data.

We are developing our next Live Timing and Scoring application using the Flash Media Server. So far our testing using this application has provided an uninterrupted continuous stream of data. The next step is to see if the CDNs can offset the load by distributing the continuous data from the Flash Media Server instead of sending the users request back to the origin. From a technical standpoint, this appears to be a better solution overall but only if there is a CDN that can offset the load. If anybody has developed live data using the Flash Media Server I would like to hear from you and the issues you have come across.

I will be showing some screen captures of the new T&S application and discuss the process of how it is being developed.

Flash or Silverlight Streaming

I am in the process of deciding what streaming format to use next year for our live media streaming applications. I am currently looking at the technical specs for Silverlight and while it has some good features I am not sure there is a compelling reasons to switch to it for next year.

At this point, we may be sticking with Flash streaming video for 2008 and here are the current reasons. Flash already large installed base. According to Forresters, 80% of all video streaming is viewed in Flash.

The biggest short term issue with Silverlight is the downloading and install their new plug in. Most users don't want to install yet another plug in on their computers. Worse, large corporations won't let you install new plug ins on computers. This is a factor when developing any application for a large audience. Microsoft has done a good job of keeping the install simple and that will quickly get them over this short term obstacle.

Adobe does need to address some issues with Flash soon or we will be switching to Silverlight in the future. Those issues are the higher cost of streaming using the Flash Media Server. There is no reason why it wouldn't cost the same as streaming a windows media file.
The main application will be built out in Flash for the 2008 season. It will have more features than what we had in 2007.