Control Group Blog

It’s been a gold medal month for CG’s clients.  While we can’t take credit for the accolades, we can live vicariously through these achievements.  These have been some of our favorite projects to work on and we agree with the judges: we think they’re pretty special too.

VH1 won a Broadcast Designers Association Gold award for their Beacon channel redesign! Check out the reel.

Walker Digital won the Gold medal at the Gaming Technology Summit.

And NEP Studios, who host the Daily Show and The Colbert Report at their Control Group-readied HD studios were nominated for a CIO 100 award from CIO Magazine.

Doing what you love, with great partners, and getting industry respect for it: what more could you ask for? What a great start to the summer! Congrats all.

Here is a series of recommendations, rants, and observations about why MSOs (the cable companies) will be sad in 2011, unless they innovate and invest.

Entertainment = Consumption + Interaction:

Internet-enabled TV will bring about some radical changes.  Nielsen’s Three Screen Report indicates that consumption of the moving image is increasing across all three screens: traditional TV, internet, and mobile. The interactivity of this “data” will surely change. Entertainment now equals both watching and interaction: checking out additional content online, playing games, or participating in ads as entertainment. 3D and gesture-based interactions will also redefine this blurring of the line between passive and active viewing over the next few years.

Ditch the “dumb” set-top:

Content models that rely on “captive audience” set-top box capture of viewing habits are outmoded as delivery systems, and deliver poor analytics and reporting compared with the information we can glean from a data-only model. If content owners rely on this information, why does the old model remain unchecked? The set-top box is largely a passive unit that doesn’t include an interface, platform, or APIs for allowing advertisers to interact directly with their target audience in real-time like the Web does. We have seen some recent (and awesome) successes with new methods of delivery: Hulu, Netflix, MLB, and on-demand efforts. However we are in an infancy of thinking about the possibilities of satellite, cable, and their antiquated set-tops, and how broadcast can recapture some of the money that migrated to online advertising.

This is an opportunity for direct access to consumers in their living rooms. The delivery method is there, there is already a large internet-enabled box in many living rooms: tuner, DVR, AppleTV, Slingbox, etc. MSOs already have the access to provide value-add applications to the experience, but what is preventing them from radically changing the intersection of TV, Internet, and advertising? They actually have had a better chance than anyone.

Develop a platform:

Imagine tying content delivery to analytics and advertising – a platform that delivers both choice and guidance to direct viewers to shows they like, and then targets accompanying ads based on more granular information and feedback. Visible World does last-mile ad insertion for parent company, Comcast, who acquired one of the big three: NBC.  A small wrinkle in this still-disputed merger is Sen. Kohl, who is asking for a divestiture of NBC’s holdings in Hulu, arguing that it potentially violates anti-trust.

But this is an amazing opportunity for MSOs to radically change the model for consumers and advertisers by providing a platform for interaction. MSOs have a chance to drive people back to their subscriptions — otherwise we will see a switch to online viewing, where advertisers can get a lot more feedback for their digital dimes, and consumers can have more choice, and augment their experiences.

The TV could supersede the MSO-provided set-top box as a platform:

Internet-enabled TVs or TVs with companion internet-enabled boxes will supersede the current MSO interface and platform. Federated search across Internet/DVR/broadcast is far more useful and less clunky than a remote-driven interface.  In addition, the ability to bring in dynamic web content — ads, additional content, or related information — should quickly reduce the three screens to just two.

When MSOs realize they are missing out on key advertising opportunities, we will see a rush to market with subscription- and licensed-content across the three screens. You would have thought that Hulu would have put the fear in them, but wait until Google TV takes their bite.  Their recent partnerships with TV manufacturer, Sony, ensures that this will be widely distributed to Best Buy, Walmart, etc. beyond the market reach of Roku, Slingboxes, of the world.

Prepare to lose ad revenue:

NBC Universal’s (current) CEO Jeff Zucker and his oft-quoted ‘trading analog dollars for digital pennies’ was revised last year to ‘digital dimes’ from the man himself. That is good news, especially for the multitudes of investors that entered into internet video ventures last year. Out of that gold-rush of investment though, there hasn’t been significant pay-dirt for many. Clearly the answer lies in uniting broadcast to the Internet, bringing the interactivity the web provides, in addition to the type of analytics that are possible. I predict Google TV will make more of an impact than Apple TV did to unite those advertising schemes, although watch out, Apple’s clearly got some plans a brewin‘.

Google TV offers the opportunity to sell ad’s within the interface, and provide targeted advertising, on the TV. Show me what you got MSO’s.

In Conclusion:

It is a rapidly changing world, and people have clearly shown that the TV, cable-tuner, and DVR do not have all the features people want. The cable companies who own the infrastructure and delivery method of video and data are being left out of this equation. Google has side-stepped around cable companies and the licensing issues — wisely I might add — and added a layer with enhancements that will allow them get deep into people’s living rooms, to collect data and provide a smarter ad platform. Things are going to get really interesting….

I wanted to add some thoughts to Chris’s post about Flash and HTML5. However I should preface this post by saying that HTML5 supporting video is really cool, both technically and because HTML5 is an open standard that anyone can implement for free. As we all know, for the last several years, Flash has been the de facto choice for online video delivery. Flash support on different platforms has been pretty good, but end users still don’t have total flexibility depending on their OS. Until recently, Flash on Linux has been about a version behind the release for Windows or OS X. Even now, Adobe only releases a player for x86, and the x86_64 version is unsupported beta software.

Everyone seems to be touting HTML5 video as the “open” alternative to the proprietary Flash plugin required for .flv playback in the browser. But how open is H.264, the codec that powers HTML5 video, and the current pick for encoding video for online delivery? Using H.264 as the codec behind HTML5 video sours things a bit for me. H.264 is encumbered by software patents; to develop or distribute a player or encoder for H.264 you might have to pay a licensing fee to MPEG-LA. Even though MPEG LA announced last week (PDF) that H.264 will remain fee-less for free internet video through 2016, this is not the same as being free or open. MPEG-LA can still go after people that produce the software to encode or decode H.264. And MPEG-LA is not just one organization, it’s a collection of patent holders that have their own agendas.

All this is a bit of a slap in the face to the open standards that power the web. Imagine if you had to pay a half million dollars to create or display JPEGs, GIFs, or HTML… The only people that would be able to afford to make software for the web would be huge companies. But what are our alternatives? Beyond Ogg Theora and Matroska, the pickings are slim. These codecs are open and free, but not necessarily better than H.264. Plus it would be next to impossible to compete with the marketing machine of Apple behind H.264.

Open and free standards have been what has made the Internet successful since its inception. I think it’s important that users understand this so that the Internet of the future cannot be controlled by corporations with enough cash to cover licensing fees.

There’s been much discussion and debate recently surrounding the iPad’s lack of Flash, which in turn has fueled discussion about the future of online video delivery. This week’s preview release of the HTML5-powered SublimeVideo player is seen by some as the beginning of the end for online video delivery in Flash player. As Senior Multimedia Development Consultant at Control Group, I thought I’d share a few thoughts on the topic.

To me, this isn’t so much a debate about Flash/ActionScript 3 versus HTML5, but rather another win for HTML + Flash/AS3! It’s all about creativity as a developer. Bad coding leads to poor applications, proper coding leads to a proper experience. It is a common pitfall that most people think “HTML or Flash”. I see this as more power for the mixing of technologies, raising the cap on what can and can’t be done in a web browser.

Adobe’s technologies provide clear benefits to the end user, but also (and perhaps more importantly) the developer. As a developer, I can utilize the unique capabilities of the .flv format to protect content in some fashion or for metadata injection, all of which can be done on the fly and server-side, if implemented using Flash Media Server (FMS).  I’m also really excited about Flash Player 10.1 – it brings the ability to scale all the way from mobile to HD flavors, and will be available on smartphones and other Internet-connected mobile devices.

This is about more than just video delivery, it is the platform combined with the tools, and Adobe has been making tremendous strides in going open-source with them. Adobe is providing a cohesive environment that is deeply integrated with some of the best tools out there for content creation. HTML5 is just starting out, and the gap between the tools and technology is too immense to make it the competition. Flash has fantastic penetration and Adobe can rapidly evolve the technology. Remember, HTML5 still is not a standard – in fact we are looking at sometime in 2012 before we’ll see a final recommendation. These are cohesive technologies and they are here to stay for a very long time, which means plugins will be around for a long time too. Simply put,  plugin implementations have the potential to penetrate faster, and as history has shown they often do. Plugins forge the path, and the Web comes right behind them to standardize those paths.

If you want to better understand what the big picture is regarding Adobe and its technologies, I recommend reading a little bit about:

OpenScreenProject
Catalyst
SVG and FXG
Flex Data Services
RTMFP (Real Time Media Flow Protocol)
Binary Sockets

We have been doing some work with with Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) which allows us to create virtual machines in the cloud in a few seconds. These are great for hosting websites, and what’s cool about them is that if you get Slashdotted or experience a similar unexpected spike in traffic you can create new hosts immediately. Recently Amazon added a new service called Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) which can distribute load across hosts. We’ve been looking at this for some of our recent development and infrastructure projects.

I just read this description of how ELB works by Shlomo Swidler from his Cloud Developer Tips blog. It’s a great reference.

You pay for ELB by usage just like everything else at AWS. From Amazon: “You are charged at $0.025 per hour for each Elastic Load Balancer, plus $0.008 per GB of data transferred through an Elastic Load Balancer.” For reference, on a deployment project in 2008 our Engineering team used a Cisco load balancer which I imagine cost a few thousand bucks.

Cost isn’t the only advantage. These can be created and destroyed quickly and remotely, allowing us to work more efficiently and spend less time visiting data centers in the middle of nowhere. This leads to improved quality of service for our clients as we can spend more time consulting on future technology growth plans and less time troubleshooting servers in cold, loud data centers.

This blog post brought to you by the iced coffee I am enjoying in the comfort and quiet of my office while deploying virtual machines!

Check out this great video that our friends at SPIN put together to show off the new SPIN Mobile iPhone app. Read more about how we built the app, and download it for free from iTunes!

SPIN publishes some of the best editorial content out there. They’ve been doing it since 1985: topical, not mainstream, but still accessible. When we heard they wanted to jump into the mobile “space race” with an iPhone application — and that they wanted CG to take that first step with them — we were pretty fired up.

So it is with great excitement that we announce the SPIN Mobile iPhone application. It’s available today for free at the iTunes Store. (Update: check out this great video that our friends at SPIN put together!)

SPIN Mobile iPhone Application

For this initial release, we wanted to accomplish something really simple: get the writing, pictures, and music that makes SPIN one of the top music magazines in the world into the palm of its readers’ hands. We wanted to push the fresh daily content, and close the loop on the complete experience: from the music news, to the latest reviews, and photo galleries of shows we wish we had been at. We also wanted to add direct downloads from iTunes, letting users listen to and purchase the albums and songs that they were experiencing on their iPhones.

With things changing at the rate they are, there was a heavy emphasis on getting an app out there quickly, staking a claim in the App Store land rush, and building from that stake down the road with a killer app for the iPhone OS 3.0 launch.

We developed the core app in four weeks with a small group of our dev team members, meeting with Spin’s design team on a weekly basis. Adjusting plans mid-flight, in a truly agile way, we changed designs, integrated with their publishing workflow, their CMS (Drupal) and added a few new tweaks in the process. I won’t say it was all roses — developing an application in four weeks on a new platform, with a full page ad in the presses can put some pressure on the team — but we got it done, and SPIN was right there with us, positive and understanding the whole time.

It’s hard not to get a little sentimental and think about my first Walkman, a bulky yellow Sony thing that was supposed to be waterproof. I used to wait weeks to get the latest copy of SPIN and then run to The Garage in Harvard Square to find the latest tape from the band they were raving about, pop it in and walk around, knowing I was up on the latest thing. Here we are 20 years later with that complete experience condensed down to just few seconds, anytime, anywhere I want. That’s what mobile is all about.

With all the turmoil in the publishing world, its so refreshing to have a client who really ‘gets it’ — understands what its base wants, knows how to monetize without being offensive, and has a plan for the future. I’m glad we could be part of the team that got this out there, and I’m looking froward to all the cool stuff we have cooking for the 3.0 release this summer.

I recently attended an Adobe Flex user group meeting here in New York where the title of the presentation was “Zend Server: A Flex Perspective”. I knew that earlier this year, Zend officially announced the Beta release of their new PHP application server product, and as a developer of large scale RIA web applications using PHP and Flex, I was anxious to learn how this new product might impact our next project. The presentation was a good, albeit brief, overview of Zend Server. However, despite the title of the presentation and the theme of the user group, no connection was made between this new product and Flex. I thought I’d try to make that connection here.

A Little Background: Zend?, Zend Server?, Flex?
Zend is known as “The PHP Company”. Their founders are key contributors to the core PHP language and the company focuses on creating products to help improve the entire PHP application development life-cycle experience. They provide products and services to help with configuration and installation, development, deployment and with production application administration and maintenance.

Zend Server dashboard

Zend Server is one of Zend’s most recent products and is a package of several different Zend offerings. On one hand, Zend Server is a certified PHP distribution that includes the most reliable and up-to-date version of PHP, tested PHP extensions, database drivers and comes bundled with Apache. It also wraps a nice, user-friendly interface around the configuration management of PHP, Apache and all these extensions to provide ease of initial environment configuration and maintenance. On the other hand, it is a suite of development components providing tools to ease development and deployment, optimize application performance by speeding up PHP execution and by providing data caching options, and assist in monitoring and debugging multiple environments running remotely. Zend Server comes in two flavors: A free community version and a commercial version. The commercial version has extra features as well as full support from Zend.

Flex is an Adobe development framework that assists in the creation of cross-platform rich internet Flash applications (RIAs). Flex has really opened-up the Flash door to non-Flash developers. It removes the need to work within the esoteric Flash movie “timeline” and allows traditional programmers a more familiar environment in which to build applications. You use the ActionScript scripting language and an XML-based markup language called MXML to build Flex applications.

Adobe Flex Builder 3

Okay, so what does one have to do with the other?
Well, as developers are turning to Flex as a presentation tier to help meet the ever growing demands of Web applications to manage and deliver rich media and deliver rich interactive user experiences, they have to turn somewhere for the application tier to deliver the services and data management that drive these flashy front-ends. To date, Java has been by far the most popular choice for this tier. So much so, that some claim there are no other “real” options. I would never argue against a decision to use Java as the application tier in an n-tier Web application environment. But I do think there are options. And I do believe PHP is one of those options.

Among many professional software developers, PHP has a reputation for not being particularly well-suited to large or extremely complex site implementations. Some even believe that PHP is nothing but a simple templating language, only to be used for initial mockups and quick demonstration POCs, and has no role in serious, production, “Enterprise” applications. I don’t want to go down the long path of refuting such misconceptions. Please take a look at Zend’s own John Coggeshall’s rebuttal of such claims. But one fair criticism of PHP, also acknowledged in Mr. Coggeshall’s article, is that PHP has been weak in “Enterprise” tooling. Java has been in this space for a while, and has several free and commercial application servers from which to choose that provide a wealth of tools and functionality to support serious, enterprise-grade applications. Zend Server is striving to fill this gap in PHP and move PHP onto the short-list of viable options when CTOs, CIOs and Managers are choosing the technology stack on which to run their next next big RIA project.

One last point, with regard to Abode Flex in particular, is that previously there has been no official supported implementation of Adobe’s Action Message Format (AMF) integration with PHP. The teaming of Adobe and Zend to back Zend_Amf, which is part of the Zend Framework bundled with Zend Server, has changed this fact. With the release of Zend_Amf, PHP can now officially speak in the native tongue of Flex’s ActionScript, making integration fast and seamless. This, along with the introduction of Zend Server, goes a long way in support of using PHP as the application server tier behind an Adobe Flex UI.