Kenny Bunch

Has sexy been gone so long, that the idea of JT bringing it back is making you itch to tell everyone? Wait no longer my American Idol inspired friend, because now you can show them. That’s right SHOW is the word, as SonyBMG has opened up their music video library for all to see and share. MusicBox is the name of the game and the site has a plethora of music content with a nice community wrapper over top of it to boot.

For those in the know, MusicBox didn’t just launch yesterday. Instead it has been evolving over this past year. Being the lucky lad that I am, I have been fortunate enough to be involved with it. So why all the fuss over something that has been around for longer than a month? Well we just brought sexy back to the video player.

That’s right as you can see above, SonyBMG has a sexy new viral video player to play that “Sexy Back”, brought to you by yours truly. The distribution code is all over the MusicBox site waiting to be grabbed.

For my fellow nerds who are curious on the tech side of things, the player is a custom interface wrapped over top of the embeddable Brightcove template. If you want to make your own custom BC viral player, the embeddable template is only available for higher end Brightcove accounts. However, if you have access to that template, and you are wanting to get your sexy on as well, below are a few pointers to save some headaches:

• don’t use the APIs to set settings, instead all settings can be set up front when loading the BC module using config values.
• want the pesky menu to disappear? set the useOverlayMenu config value to false
• with a viral player, BC loves Javascript and sites hate it. set the config disableJavascriptAPI to true, call System.security.allowDomain(”*”);, and if you are aiming for MySpace set the config domain to embed.
• using streaming media, call {player_instance_here}.base.mWorkArea.layout.mPlayer_mp.mContentCompleted = false; in your media start events, which will ensure that mediaComplete event gets called.

All of the above are simple actions, but if you don’t know them you’ll be searching the docs and scratching your head wondering why things don’t work. On that note, good luck to the nerds and happy sharing to my pop loving buddies.

Last month we relaunched Adult Swim’s video gallery application and brought it up to the to cool for school 2.0 status. For those not in the know, the first release was just a reskin of the Cartoon release and the point release after that was an update from Windows Media to Flash video. This new release is a reskin, relayout, and interaction change.

Layout Choice
So why the new layout? Well if you look at the app, it’s very apparent that it resembles a YouTube layout. This was done because the layout provided advantages over the existing layout. For starters it uses a common interaction model that users are familiar with, so it automatically yields ease of use based on that notion alone. YouTube also does a good job of separating out functions of browse, search, and view. Typically most of the Flash video apps tie these functions together. For example, the Cartoon player has video as the main focus but always maintains a consistent navigation. In this model you have limited room for the current video’s details and browsing. By separating and opening it up in the way that YouTube does, the browse and search sections are a lot larger and the amount of content is more apparent. In addition, subsections and filters can be listed out beneath sections in context which allow for quick jumping. For example, the navigation options Comedy, Robot Chicken, and Most Viewed are available all at the same time. In the previous model, this required navigating between screens. Keeping search as a consistent function also provides for quicker jump points, since it is always present. Just like the browse perspective, the video perspective has more space to focus on everything that defines a video. It seems a little bare now, but you can imagine that there are a lot of elements you can attach to a video. By design this setup allows for that. All in all the new layout provides a more focused experience.

Flash vs HTML
Ok great layout, but why is it all in Flash and not HTML like YouTube? Good question and there are a few reasons. One of the main reasons is the nature of Adult Swim’s servers and deployment. For the most part, everything is statically deployed pages vs dynamically deployed pages. Most of their service based offerings are just that, services. In the case of video, the system was already deployed as a service based system. Although we did updates to the system, it is the exact same system and can be used for multiple frontend clients. In this case, the main task was simply modifying the client. Since I handled the entire client and it took me a relatively short time to update, time to market was minimal. Thus time and existing systems were a factor. On the other side of the foot, you have interaction models. Having the application in Flash allowed us to create a unified experience. Unlike YouTube, viewing and browsing aren’t completely broken. When switching in between tasks, you are able to continue viewing while browsing. This type of unification is also seen in browsing, where page to page navigation doesn’t require a page refresh. With all that said, the application does suffer from the fact that it doesn’t offer browser history navigation using the previous and back buttons, defined urls in the browser for deeplinking, and indexable content. It suffers now, but I have solutions that don’t require many changes which may be integrated in the near future ;).

New Features
You are thinking lovely this is a great new layout, but does it do anything new other than look fabulously cool? How about the new sorting features Chuck? Now you can actually sort your video results by most viewed, most popular, most hated, and most recent. Even better, you can apply these sorts to the entire video collection. Yes, you can browse or search the entire collection. This is unlike the previous version which only allowed you to browse per section. More control over choosing what you want to view is always a good thing and control over the content itself can be even better. Well we updated it to be like YouTube and added one of YouTube’s most successful features. Oh buddy that’s right, we got viral. Now you can find a clip that you want and post it to your blog. Free AS content for the taking! That said, there is a constraint. Currently full episodes aren’t shareable. This is primarily due to the fact that networks posting content online are only allowed to maintain specific amounts of content at a any given time. There are many restrictions placed on them by their cable and content creator relationships, and this is one of them. It is unfortunate, but I think I have a few solutions up my sleeve that can address these constraints.

Future changes
Love the new features, but are you wanting more or feel like something was taken away? My biggest gripe with the player is that we can’t go true fullscreen right now. This happened with the point release from Windows Media to Flash. The reason is that the companion image ad for videos is in HTML (even though it appears to be part of the Flash movie). Having the ad this way requires changing the WMode of Flash to render correctly and ties the renderer to the browser. This restriction makes going fullscreen technically impossible. We are taking steps to change this and provide a true fullscreen experience. If you are viewing a show you want to be able VIEW the show! The other changes would be related to things I hinted to before. I’d like to provide a means of sharing episodes, allowing browser history browsing and deeplinking, indexing the content, and opening up the things that you can “view and do” in relation a video. Regardless of what I want to do, comment in on what you think and what you might want to do. In the meantime, check out some great LEGAL Family Guy clips!

As some of you might have noticed when sizing the SuperDeluxe video player to smaller dimensions, sometimes the information dialogs were overflowing. Today we released an update addressing this. The informationals are now a lot cleaner with unnecessary elements removed and more space for content. In addition, the title/status line will autoscroll when it has more text than can be seen. Of course there are few small under the hood changes, but these visual ones really stand out. To that note, I tend to never be satisified with most projects, so it’s great to be able to polish up the player and remove the rough edges.

Adult Swim Fix is the proper name for the Adult Swim video application and it is not new. However, as of last week it does have a new video format. It has been switched to the most popular format on the web, Flash.Anyone who is familiar with the application can see that it looks exactly the same. Well, point blank, that is because it is. You see when I wrote it (as well as the Cartoon Video and Toonami players which are still WM), I wrote the player to be format agnostic. When they play video, they have no clue of what the video is, just that it is video. The players are set up where their playback can be changed in a one line reference switch to: Windows Media Streaming, Windows Media Progressive, Quicktime Progressive, Flash Streaming, or Flash Progressive. The rest of the application logic remains the same including the ad serving, tracking, service request, etc.Why did I do this? I did it so that the application could be adapted for variant uses, and more importantly, I did it to make choice a very simple option. I first had to convince the machine that video on the web is a good idea and work within their comfort zone. In the same breathe, I wanted to make it easy enough for them to move from their comfort zone to an area where they can form advances. It was all strategic and done in the best interests of the companies using the player.All said, the Fix Flash conversion was step A. Right now I consider it a “ghetto player” comparable to the likes of those like Brightcove. Not that it, or they are not good, but the focus in the wrong place and not on the users. I intend to do better, a lot better, I just needed to open the doors first ;).If anyone is interested, I’ll be briefly touching on Adult Swim Fix, SuperDeluxe, and other video projects in my presentation at FITC in April.

As of Wednesday January 17, 2007, Turner Broadcasting’s new comedy broadband site, SuperDeluxe, is alive and well. The project is a YouTube of sorts, but with highlighted content (right now coming from professionals). It’s an interesting approach because it is very niche, focusing on comedy and putting an editorial voice around it. Though it has a community aspect, it is not striving to be a YouTube or MySpace, instead it strives to be what it is, comedy. In a time where increasingly we are overwhelmed with mass amounts of contents, having to sift and search through everything, an organized niche provides a place to find something of particular interest.

I’m personally interested to see how it does, as I had the privilege of working on it. You see, the flashy little video player, the code running it is courtesy of yours truely. I was the video player code monkey and consulted at a high level on the project. Luckily for me, I was actually able to enlist the creative director Todd Dominey (aka the DOM father), to get his hands dirty and design the player. Needless to say, I’m pretty happy with how it came out. The design, ui feedback, ad model, and tracking all seemed to work out pretty smoothly.Overall, working with the list of players at SD was a great experience, I think their hard work shows in the site. I was privileged and honored to be a part of it.

For now, have a laugh and enjoy some SD comedy

Note: most of these videos are rated “mature,” so they may not be safe for workplace viewing.

Making Friends with Chelsea Peretti

ArchDuke

Flying

The Ted Zone

Right before Christmas 06 I got to create a quick and “interesting” e-card application for Adult Swim’s show Assy McGee. The app allows you to choose a type of recipient and a greeting, it then blends the choices together with related props, clothes, and message pieces into a single e-card for your loved ones to enjoy. The only external piece other than the Flash was a backend service that sent an email containing the html page the SWF was embeded on with query params that reflected a user’s selections. When your unexpecting recipient visited the url, the SWF was fed the params via FlashVars and they were fed an Assy greeting full of wisdom.

Now I have to point out that for those who aren’t comfortable with things that contain a lewd sense of humor to the tune of the South Park genre, the app is definitely not for you. If it’s any forewarning, the character the e-card is based on is a pair of legs and a backside. So with that said, for those who think they may get a good laugh, send your friends some Assy!.

Dreamsocket (my personal company) was chosen to develop a game console application for Cartoon Network in partnership with Sony, Dreamworks/PDI, Microsoft Entertainment, Dualstar Entertainment, GA Tech, The Barbarian Group, and Beyond Z. In preparation, I will be flying out to Hollywood tonight with Cartoon Network’s Art Director for introduction meetings and will be there until Friday. I’m pretty excited given the context of the project and the people involved.

In an attempt to start using AS3 and Flexbuilder, I created a simple module (based in part on Brendan Dawes “Cinema Redux” processing experiment), that visualizes a movie by taking snapshots of frames on a supplied sample rate. It uses those snapshots to create a visual mosaic image, which allows you to see the use of light, color, and transition throughout the movie.
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