New Media @Nos

New Media @NOS March 5th 2010, Rotterdam Jan Willem Eshuis

About me

This is what I am

Jan-Willem Eshuis

Our mission always, everywhere for everybody

New Media department ‣ 1 head of New Media ‣ 4 developers (including myself) ‣ 2 designers ‣ 2 projectmanagers ‣ 1 freelance interaction designer always, everywhere ‣ 1 freelancer designer for everybody ‣ 5 freelance developers ‣ 1 freelancer projectmanager 17

In this presentation ‣ I’ll show you a couple of technical details of our work @NOS ‣ I’ll talk about standards and rights ‣ I’ll talk about the long tail

Questions? Just ask them

What is New Media @NOS ‣ Website(s) ‣ Mobile ‣ application ‣ websites ‣ Emerging Platforms ‣ API on content platform ‣ application(s) for devices like Sony PS3 ‣ Innovation

Growing amount of different parties and platforms is a problem challenge

Our solution for the growing amount of platforms is the central content database

Architecture overview Back-End Content Platform Narrow Website Mobile Syndication Casting

Content Platform is the heart ‣ All external publication of content comes from the content platform ‣ The website, mobile website etc.. are all generated by this platform ‣ Every content item has the same basic set of meta-data ‣ Content database holds all information about articles, files, video, audio, broadcast, live events, live scores etc..

Content DB Architecture Write actions Master Database Master Database Content Platform Read actions SQL Proxy Slave 1 Slave 2 Slave 3 Slave 4

Content Platform Modules ‣ Admin (just to manage accounts and log files) ‣ Import routines (import of content from different resources) ‣ Export routines (creates RSS Feeds, special XML feeds for partners) ‣ API (makes it possible for external parties to get information from the content database, also used internaly) ‣ Social (connections to Twitter and other social networking systems)

More than 1 system ‣ The whole New Media part of NOS is setup as a SOA enviroment ‣ This means we run a lot of different pieces of software (almost everything is developed our selfs) ‣ All system talk to each other on XML basis (an yes, that’s human readable XML)

Example, a news story on the website

System flow Dataﬂow Systems Small Story on Cyclone Teletekst XML XML Content Tridion CMS Management XML XML Content PHP + MySQL Database XML XML HTML + JS + Website PHP + MySQL

Disadvantages ‣ 4 different systems are involved that have to be maintained ‣ More sytems and connections means a bigger chance of failure

Advantages of this way ‣ The 4 systems are very good at their own job ‣ Each system is proven technology ‣ Connections are XML based, it’s all human readable XML ‣ Each system can be replaced with another system if it outputs (or imports) the same XML

Website some technical details

Just some little details ‣ Content Platform runs in 6 webservers using ‣ Content Database runs on 6 machines (mainly databases) ‣ Website(s) run on 9 machines ‣ We have 1 machine for our search index ‣ The all run open source software like Apache, Linux, MySQL, Solr and PHP

Hits on the website ‣ On average we do about 100.000 requests on the servers per minutes (a webpage can contain more than 1 request of course) ‣ On peaks its more than 500.000 requests per minute ‣ We love static content, why? Let’s take a look at the next slide :-)

Static versus dynamic content Dynamic Expensive Hybrid Static Cheap

So how about performance/caching? ‣ All important pages on our website(s) are static ‣ All helper files (like CSS and Javascript) are packed ‣ Almost all database queries are cached in memory

Standards and Rights

Standards? ‣ Of course we use HTML, CSS and Javascript following the standards ‣ All our code is written in PHP and the applications are build on (open source) Zend Framework ‣ Our servers run on open source. We use Linux, Apache, LightHTTP, MySQL, Memcache etc..

Video standards? ‣ This is the biggest problem in our job these days, for example: ‣ Every video is encoded into 4 different formats (3G mobile, Flash, MP4 H264 vodcast, Windows Media) ‣ Every broadcast is encoded in 5 different formats (MP4 HQ, Flash, Windows Media, MP4 H264, 3G mobile) ‣ Every audio has only 1 format (mp3)

But... ‣ What are open standards and when are the open? ‣ Example: Flash has a penetration of more than 99% but it’s not an official open standard ‣ What do you think about it?

Rights ‣ Big difference between news and sport(s) rights ‣ Most of the big sport events are sold to the EBU (European Broadcasting Union), a large group of public broadcaster from all over Europe. ‣ Rights holders are trying to protect there rigths at any cost, for example, the IOC sells the rights to the EBU and we (NOS) are only allowed to broadcast them in the Netherlands ‣ One stange example: All the material of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics muyst be offline 30 days after the closing ceremony

Last minute added sheet:-) ‣ Company’s like Ziggo have a problem ‣ the prices for a connection are low ‣ the costs of the network are rising because of broadcasters like NOS and RTL. ‣ the need to earn money in the future with content ‣ But that’s where the problem is ‣ More and more content is only available for right holders ‣ Rights are to expensive

Consequences ‣ Video (live and on-demand) material needs to be GEO-IP protected and anti-deeplink protected ‣ To protect our live and on-demand content we use a multiple anti-deelink mechanisme ‣ Only users with a session on our website can access the playlists ‣ Only valid sessions will return a playlist with a deeplink to the video ‣ The deeplinks are only valid for 60 seconds

What happens if we use the internet for live streaming of sports of politics

How it works ‣ At NOS we try to stream as mutch content LIVE if we have the rights ‣ The biggest problem with live-streaming is the capacity of the networks ‣ The providers and company networks are a bigger problem than our own network (at this moment) ‣ We can go up to 80Gbit/s (touched the limit couple of times)

Some numbers ‣ During the Beijing Olympics on 2008 we served a total of 20 million live-streams ‣ We served about 7.4 million on demand streams ‣ The most popular day was 21th of August ‣ There where about 100.000 concurrent viewers on our live-streams ‣ The use about 76Gbit/s

This is what happens:-)

Only sports is popular? No:-) ‣ On the 18th of february there was a big debat on the television but the broadcasting stopped at about 18:00 ‣ From that moment the live-stream of the Dutch Parlement had about 40.000 concurrent viewers ‣ So not only sports is atractive, also politics is

Last 2 weeks there was Vancouver Olympics 2010

Vancouver Olympics 2010

Results (16 days) ‣ 2,7 million unique visitors ‣ 38+ million pageviews ‣ 4,5 million started LIVE streams ‣ 9 million starten on-demand streams ‣ Most viewed video is the crash of Koemaritasjvili

How we implemented Search at our website

65.000 articles, 40.000 video’s, 50.000 audio clips

Search Architecture Content Website Database API SOLR Engine Index

Losely coupeled ‣ Use of proven technology (we use a SOLR search engine) ‣ Easy to maintain ‣ Open system, build on the future ‣ XML, PHP, JSON in- and export ‣ Stupid engine, garbage in = garbage out ‣ API makes it easier to connect

Search engine is used not only to search

Result page of the search engine

How a thing like publishing a broadcast works.

Example, broadcasts on the website Another example, the search engine

Architecture Direction Studio Television Cable Companies Broadcast XML Triggers Encoder 2 Encoder 1 XML and video ﬁle XML and video ﬁle Content Database

How this works ‣ Every (almost) broadcast we do is live ‣ When the studio signals is going to the public channel a trigger is send (XML trigger) ‣ The encoder starts because it receives a trigger ‣ After the broadcast is finished another trigger (XML) is send, the encoder stops ‣ The encoders put’s the encoded files on the file system

How this works ‣ The encoded files are received by a content listener (some sort of service) ‣ The content listener put’s the files on the correct systems and tells the content databases about the existence of the file ‣ Meta-data is generated automatically ‣ The files are published to the website

Result ‣ You can watch the broadcast anywhere at anytime on a lot of devices ‣ Internet (website) ‣ Mobile (website and application) ‣ Philips NetTV ‣ Sony Bravia TV ‣ Sony Playstation ‣ and more....

How about the long tail and social media?

The long tail @NOS ‣ We have long tail but it’s a small one ‣ We provide news and sports on our websites and other platforms, more than 90% of all the traffic os from todays news ‣ Video’s can be shared on other websites but only in our own player, so we can run our statistics on it

Twitter @NOS ‣ We have a couple of Twitter accounts ‣ We auto publish information to this account ‣ The most popular account is @telektest with more than 12.000 followers ‣ We deliver content to Twitter with our own Social API ‣ You can also find us on http://www.wizardsofnos.nl

Questions?

@jweshuis http://twitter.com/jweshuis http://www.janwillemeshuis.nl

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New Media @Nos

by Jan Willem Eshuis on Mar 05, 2010

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New Media @Nos — Presentation Transcript