Douglas Bowman recently posted an interesting account of his time spent as lead designer for Google, as part of a public goodbye letter to the company. Particularly fascinating to me is the commentary on how an ingrained engineering culture made adopting design leadership difficult:

Seven years is a long time to run a company without a classically trained designer. Google had plenty of designers on staff then, but most of them had backgrounds in CS or HCI. And none of them were in high-up, respected leadership positions. Without a person at (or near) the helm who thoroughly understands the principles and elements of Design, a company eventually runs out of reasons for design decisions.

Reading this makes me grateful for the emphasis and priority on design that Brightcove has had since the founding of the company. We have an extremely productive relationship between design and development, I couldn't imagine what it would be like to work any other way. Doug provides specifics on how an imbalance can cripple the design process:

Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case.

While I believe that testing and empirical data are valuable in making informed design decisions, design by necessity is an intuitive practice. At some point the designer must be willing, and empowered, to be able to make decisions about the right design.

I can remember Doug's talk at An Event Apart Boston, and how he went into fascinating detail on the implications of design on products that operate at Google's scale. Specific examples of how the layout for Google calendars had to evolve based on load time requirements, and how a few bytes of extraneous CSS could multiply to massive bandwidth overhead were terribly interesting to hear. Although his talk was very positive and framed these issues as inspiring design challenges, reading between the lines one could see where his current frustration arose.

Labels: brightcove, design, Links

As part of our latest round of work for Sun Microsystems, the Brightcove professional services team put together an iPhone-specific interface for their video portal. This takes advantage of Brightcove's support for MPEG-4 video and multiple renditions, allowing Sun to add a video file specifically for iPhone viewing to each of their published videos.



Sun has deployed iPhones to a large number of their employees, so this should be of use to them. Accessing channelsun.sun.com from an iPhone or iPod Touch will take you directly to this project.



We are also ramping up an initiative at Brightcove to share more knowledge and information about the world of video with our customers, using a new site and forum combination for publishing articles and answering questions. I have planned two articles around designing for video. One will be about simple iPhone-specific websites using the above project as an example, and another will be a longer article about the difference between short- and long-form content, and how the experiences for both should be designed. Fun stuff!

Labels: brightcove, design, internet, Video

The biggest project to date from our professional services team at Brightcove launched yesterday: the new and vastly improved Showtime Video. It was great to be able to contribute to such a high profile project, especially for a company that produces shows like Weeds and Dexter, easily the best stuff coming out of premium television channels at the moment.

But what was really special about this particular project was the shift away from a large Flash player and towards a page based system utilizing just a single video player. This was something we had been eager to work on since the formation of the services team, and that we were able to implement it for a high profile partner like Showtime really made the project exciting. The benefits of this type of video experience are clear both in the usability for Showtime's viewers, and in the improved search engine visibility of their video content. I'm hoping this project will serve as an example for our other partners of what is possible with the Brightcove APIs.

Labels: brightcove, design, Projects, Video

Internet TV got exciting this week. Adobe announced support for the h.264 codec in Flash, an ubiquitous and highly useful format for providing video. There is a lot that is very cool about this development, and there are people who know a lot more about it than I do who have written comprehensive and interesting blog posts about it. For me, I believe this development will help realize the 'Internet TV' concept, moving us from streaming clips to long format, near-HD content.

But the shocking part is that while the technology behind internet video took a huge step forward this week, cable television dropped another rung down into the cesspool of over-priced mediocrity it has been stagnating in for a decade now.

I received a letter this month informing me that my cable service, already around the $150 mark, would be going up another $5. No specific feature or upgrade justified this, just a vague marketing hand wave at a 'continued investment' into the future. Considering how little we actually watch television in this household, and how much better that experience is facilitated by downloading the shows online, we decided to kick Comcast out of our house.

1. What do they even provide?
Any sort of non-linear television programming is available online via Usenet, Torrents or whatever particular flavor of file sharing you prefer. Generally speaking, an hour long tv program (well, 40m once the commercials have been cut out) can be downloaded in under ten minutes. This is less than we usually wait for the DVR to buffer enough that we can skip the commercials. Despite all the money we pay for cable, more often than not we end up just downloading the show because its easier and a better experience.

So with that, there is very little content left on cable television that we can't obtain easily online. What's left is essentially news and sports. The internet and Katie Couric have rendered news television useless (and who's home at 6:30pm for the national news anyway), and the talking heads on the cable channels are about as useful as talk radio. This leaves Comcast providing exactly one thing that can't be obtained online: sports programming. Specifically, NFL games. We are paying over $1500 a year to watch the New England Patriots. If I had realized this earlier I would have just bought tickets to the games.

2. Can we get this content elsewhere?
So all that's keeping cable in the house is the NFL. The NFL is shown on the major networks, which are by law required to provide free over the air broadcasts. Not only that, they are required to provide digital, HD broadcasts of their content. Coming from Maine, and of parents who never got cable TV (I can thank them now), I had a bias towards broadcast. Its just not a great delivery technology in a more rural environment. The city is different. According to antennaeweb.org, a useful site that tells you what broadcasts you can receive based on your street address, I was within range of every major network's HD broadcast.

3. Make it happen!
I picked up a simple indoor antennae that had some good reviews from Radio Shack. They offer a 30 day cash return policy, so if the technology wasn't what it claimed to be I could just take it back the next morning. I plugged this into my bedroom LCD which has a built in HDTV tuner.



The TV flipped through all the channels and programmed in presets for everything that showed signs of reception. I sat there kicking myself for not knowing about this technology earlier as I watched over 20 channels blip by. Every major network (CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX and CB or whatever it is) were being received in either 720p or 1080i. Most of them looked better than they do on Comcast HD. PBS has two offerings, and the visual quality is absolutely stunning. I had a few minor reception hick-ups with FOX, but a few adjustments to the antennae (which is done via remote control!) solved that. Victory over the cable monopoly was being pulled out of the air.

4. Further integration, making it cool.
Broadcast HD was obtained on the bedroom TV. Very cool, but we tend to watch sporting events in the living room on our projector. The projector doesn't have a built in tuner, so plugging an antennae into it isn't an option. Fortunately I had previously come across a device that not only solves that problem, it brings an additional pile of awesome to the broadcast HD world: The HD Homerun from Elgato.



Elgato has for a long time made interesting devices for the Macintosh that let you tune in cable or antennae programming and use your Mac as both the digital tuner for browsing show schedules and also as a DVR. You can record, pause and schedule programming like a Comcast DVR box. The HD Homerun takes this a step further. Instead of being a USB device, it plugs into an ethernet network, and allows you to share an antennae and cable cable connection (it supports two inputs at once!) across your LAN. Instead of having two large weird-looking antennas, I can plug the one into this box, and access HD programming from both bedroom and living room.

To function, this device requires a Mac. Fortunately I have a Mac mini in the bedroom and an iMac in the living room, already integrated with both the TV and projector. I installed an ethernet network between these machines earlier in the year for streaming HD movies over the network, and integrating with the Homerun box should be a piece of cake.

Conclusion
I do enjoy the convenience of cable. Its there, its always on and it generally works. Its very easy to flip it on when you're bored and find a Seinfeld re-run to fall asleep in front of. But paying over $100 every month for a service that I use infrequently at best is absurd. There is a lot of slack here and, circling back to the top of this post, the foundation has been laid this week for Internet TV to start pulling in a lot of it. I think there are strong parallels between the lazy, screw-the-customer attitude of the cable providers and that of the music industry pre- Napster. I look forward to sinking the money I used to pay for cable each month into a low-energy file server for holding all my new television programming.

Labels: brightcove, cable, insanity, internet, television, Video

Check out this funny video that the summer interns made with Aftermix:

Labels: brightcove, Video

I just found this blog post complementing the design of the current Brightcove video players. Its nice to see someone notice and praise the more subtle interaction and design decisions.

Labels: brightcove, design, internet, Links, Video

Everyone is wild for widgets, or so they tell me. Here is one we just finished up at work:



This ties into a new page we call Brightcove Takeout. Its basically a whole bunch of RSS feeds from different areas of the site. In addition to getting the RSS feed, you can grab a widget powered by the feed (Takeout boxes). The one I posted here is powered by a feed of my most recent video uploads. Pretty neat.

Labels: brightcove, internet, Video, widget

This is a Flash widget that is distributed by a site called yourminis.com and is capable of accessing the Brightcove site to pull down content of your choice. I have this one configured to do a search for the term 'nat' on Brightcove and return the results. It can also be setup to use a category RSS feed to show the newest video in the Music category or something similar.

I'm a little skeptical of the amount of hype associated with widgets, mostly because they generally seem to be useless eye candy shoved into the side column of a blog I'll never look at again. This particular widget however provides a lot of functionality and customizable behavior in a slick little interface.

Update:
A site I've always liked, The International Herald Tribune, has started using one of these widgets in their Style section. Take a look!

Labels: brightcove, Video, widget

Here is a quick video overview about the Dominican Republic, where Cassie and I happen to be going on Saturday. :)



More video about other sunny destinations can be found on Resorts Travel TV's Brightcove channel.

Labels: brightcove, Vacation, Video

I just noticed that the ski mountain I spent nearly every winter weekend at during highschool has deployed Brightcove video on their site! Very cool, and a much needed upgrade from the tired old webcam shots they've been using for so long. I'm not quite sure how they managed to make it appear as if they actually have snow, because eyewitness reports have informed me that there was little of it to be found when these videos were made. Must be all that snowmaking technology in action.

Labels: brightcove, snowboarding, Video