Follow IMS through Twitter

Twitter is a great tool for passive conversation. For me, it has been a great way to keep track of friends and follow people in the industry.

IMS plans to provide regular information about events, tickets, promotions, IMS trivia and much more through its Twitter feed, with opportunities for interaction with fans.

Check it out and follow all of the excitement going on at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway during it's Centennial Anniversary.

Online Racing Community Continues To Grow

The Indy 500 Online Community continues to grow and is quickly becoming the Internets largest online racing community. As the Indianapolis Motor Speedway approaches it's Centennial Anniversary, participation continues to increase.

Look for a number of updates to the community section. As always, any ideas you have we want to hear them.

Live video streaming for USAC continues

The exciting action for USAC racing was streamed this year using Flash Media Server. USAC has a Live Pit Pass application http://www.usacracing.com/usac_live that lists how to follow all of the racing.

There will be a couple of enhancements to the player next year. FMS will still be the streaming application for next year. The quality will be upgraded to H264. Make sure you tune in and watch the races.

Centennial Era Around The Corner

The Indianapolis Motor Speedway Centennial Era starts Jan 1. We are collecting everything from photos, videos, comments, Blogs, etc.. Please keep this information coming.

We are in the process of making this data easier to sort and access for everybody. This will be the largest collection of data for racing on the internet. A big thanks to everybody who is helping build this historical racing collection.

Go here to see where you can contribute to this collection.

Retail Updates

Still in catch up mode for the Blog. The IMS Retail store front was updated the week before Thanksgiving to get everything ready for the Holiday sales.

We are in the process of adding additional integration with Search Marketing, Directory Listings and enhanced site integrations.

I am still looking at a associate programs. If there are any good ones out there drop me a line.

Our store is being upgraded to be open ended. This means that 3rd party suppliers will be able to sell their products through our store much like what Amazon.com has set up through there stores.

Investigating Wowza and the Cloud

Next week I am going to investigate Wowza Media Server Pro Unlimited for Amazon EC2 (beta) and how it stacks up to Adobe's FMIS on the EC2 instances.

For 2008, FMIS did a good job streaming out our live T&S along with video. FMIS has a solid package that is easy to deploy in a small or large scale environment. The Origin/Edge configuration worked smoothly. There were a few odd instances on the edges from time to time but overall it did the job.

The reason we looking to move away from FMIS is because of price. FMIS is $4,500 per license. This is a good price if you use one server consistently. The price adds up quickly when you have to stream out tens of thousands of concurrent streams.

Adobe doesn't have an EC2 pay model. It makes no sense why not because most live events are large and don't happen daily. Using a per server license model isn't cost effective for scalable live events. One of the huge advantages of Cloud Computing is scalability and Adobe currently doesn't take advantage of this.

Wowza has a model for the EC2 (http://www.wowzamedia.com/ec2.php). The real question will be how easily it is to port our FMS setup to Wowza. If it is relatively easy, I can see a lot of businesses looking at Wowza.

If anybody else has had success using Wowza on EC2, I would like to hear your comments.

Head in the Clouds

Looking back at 2008, we made some huge changes on the technical side of our websites. The biggest change was the move to Cloud Computing. There are different types of cloud computing offered by various companies so I will only speak to Amazon's Web Services.

Our biggest challenge each year is to gear up for the month of May. Each year traffic increases 200% - 300%. Leasing hardware for one month is very expensive. The other issue we had was finding the right amount of hardware to handle the Indy Racing League events. ISP's and CDN's had partial solutions but nobody had the right combination to handle bursts of traffic for short durations of time during live events.

The complete solution for live events turned out to be Cloud Computing. Specifically, EC2 instances running Linux/Unix. Cloud allowed us to do 3 critical components for us. 1. Scalability, 2. Reliability 3. Massive Storage.

1. Scalability -- EC2 is broken down into instances ranging from small instances to xtra large instances. These instances are based on different configurations of memory, CPU and storage. These instances are rented by the hour which makes it very cost effective for our live events.

Scalability is nice but it is even more important to quickly scale up during events. A moving variable for us is not knowing how many users will watch events live. TV not showing an event causes a large increase in online viewer ship although that has leveled off with the adaptation of broadband over the past few years.

Our ingenious staff has been able to replicate and deploy these instances within 15 minutes. Down from 24 hours back in April. We monitor traffic levels during the events so we know when to start up new instances when we hit certain levels of traffic. This flexibility has allowed us to go to the next level of entertainment for our fans.

The EC2's have been used for our websites, Live T&S and Live video streaming.

2. Reliability -- CDN's do a great job handling large amounts of traffic. The biggest drawback is you have to estimate how much traffic you will have each year. This is difficult to do and if you underestimate then you are basically penalized by paying more for each Gig thereafter.

What Cloud Computing offers is basically an all in one package. You get the benefits of and ISP combined with a CDN. (Note: You don't get all the benefits you would normally get with a CDN). I am not sure what CDN Amazon uses or even if they use one. The bottom line is the experience didn't change enough to require a CDN.

Amazon's infrastructure has been reliable given the importance of delivering live data on a large scale.

3. Massive Storage -- A service called S3. S3 can be used as a stand alone service or tied into the EC2 services. We use it for both. S3 has been great for a backup large scale storage solution. Hopefully by the end of 2009, the entire Indianapolis Motor Speedway image library will be on the S3 service.

This is just a very brief overview of a technical shift we embraced for 2008 and have grown it throughout the year. The 2009 season will see a number of enhancements and new developments based on cloud computing that we could have never done before.