Cantina Consulting » RIA / Flash

Google Analytics Event Tracking now available to all accounts

adam — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 17:33:55 +0000

We tend to do a fair bit of analytics integrations for our clients, mainly in Google Analytics and Omniture. Both provide great features for tracking standard web site usage metrics, including page views, visits, entry/exit points, and more. Until recently, Omniture has had a leg up in one particular area of the analytics space, namely video metrics.

It is beyond value what a content publisher, advertiser, syndicator or whoever else you can think of can glean from metrics that track the behavior of viewers of video content. Here are some key items that can be “gleaned”:

Popularity of certain videos
Which kinds of video content retains users (e.g., short form vs. long form, ad-supported vs. free, etc)
Abandonment of playback (e.g., when does a user call it quits on a clip)
How is the content shared? Does a user send it to a friend, to Facebook, to a blog?

This kind of data can clearly help a variety of video content providers and advertisers target content better to their users and produce better content overall. In this space, Omniture has been leading the charge for a while now with their SiteCatalyst product suite, which includes specific video metrics. The product suite includes an API which can integrate directly into a Flash-based video player, with particularly close integration with Brightcove’s video players, and provides hooks to track the various user behaviors that can occur during video playback.

Google does not want to be left behind in this space, given that they wish to “organize the world’s information”, and have recently opened up a relatively new component of their Google Analytics to all users of that service. The Event Tracking API has now been added to all Google Analytics accounts, whereas previously it was an invite-only beta feature. This portion of their analytics API allows you to track almost arbitrary event-oriented data, without affecting the more conventional web site-oriented metrics, such as pageviews. Event Tracking really enables users of Google Analytics to leverage the platform for video tracking, allow you to define and measure user events that are important to your video content and players. Here are some examples:

Start playback of video
Pauses and resumes
Skipping backwards or forwards in a clip
Turning the volume up or down
How far the user got before stopping or moving to another clip

But the richness this kind of event tracking doesn’t stop there. With the proliferation of RIA applications on the web, you now have the opportunity to track user behavior, beyond video playback, at a greater level of detail.

Track search terms within Flash or Flex-based applications
Follow navigation paths through RIA applications without incurring page views in your metrics
Track viral features in a video player or other RIA application: blog posts & social link sharing (Delicious, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon)
The list goes on…

Check out a great primer on using the API at the link below.

http://www.insideria.com/2009/02/using-google-analytics-within.html

Web-based video on the iPhone sans Flash

adam — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 15:44:04 +0000

Brightcove isn’t waiting around for Flash to be supported on the iPhone. They’ve recently published an article in the help section of their web site which illustrates how easy it is to build web applications targeted for the iPhone using Brightcove’s Media API, without any server side code.

http://help.brightcove.com/developer/samples/iPhone/iPhone-portal.cfm

This sample application highlights a couple interest points regarding the iPhone and Brightcove:

Just because the iPhone doesn’t currently support Flash doesn’t mean that you can’t deliver high quality video via web applications. Brightcove’s sample iPhone web application simply loads an h.264 encoded QuickTime into the iPhone browser which can be played through the iPhone’s built-in QuickTime video player. No Flash needed.
With some fairly basic JavaScript, you can achieve functionality in a web application similar to native applications with support for clean and “touchable” menus, and orientation (portrait vs. landscape) detection
Brightcove’s RESTful Media API provides a flexible way to incorporate videos published through their platform, without requiring a Flash video player

Adobe Releases Flash 10 Player

chris — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 13:17:47 +0000

Flash 1… 2… 3… 4… 5… MX… MX 2004… 8… 9… … … and now? Just “10″. nice and easy.

The latest and greatest from Adobe includes support for native 3D (bring on more carousel views), “inverse kinematics“, jointed assets that react intelligently to each other when animated (see PrayStation circa ‘99?). Additionally, they promise advanced text rendering and control (again), dynamic sound gen, and an yet another “advanced” drawing API. How about animating rounded corner masks? What will this all bring? The resurgence of the intro skip or further along the never ending path to a “richer experience”. we’ll see…

Pivot UI Toolkit 1.0 Released

adam — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 19:00:33 +0000

Our good friend and former colleague Greg Brown has just recently launched the first official 1.0 release of the open source Pivot Toolkit. The Pivot Toolkit provides Java developers a great new way to build applications with rich user interfaces that can be easily deployed both to web users and to desktop users.

Pivot harnesses the power of the Java2D API and packages it in a toolkit that offers these benefits:

MVC architecture to separate controller logic from the view layer
XML-based markup (WTKX) to design views including CSS-like style definition
Easy integration with remote web data services
Built-in charting capabilities based on JFreeChart

Check it out: http://pivot-toolkit.org/

Red5 wicked cool

matt — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 16:37:04 +0000

I have been playing around with Red5 Media Server, the open source flash server. I have to say – wicked cool. I’d never be able to afford a working version of Flash Media Server but always wanted to play around with the functionality.

I’m amazed at the way the Red5 developers have been able to reverse engineer the protocol for the RTMP by observing byte streams – who wooda thunk. Check it out at – http://osflash.org/red5/discovery or check out this email discussion thread – http://osflash.org/pipermail/red5_osflash.org/2005-September/000134.html

Anyway, for anyone unfamiliar with the Red5 technology the server is built in Java (Ruby version to come soon???) and the install was fairly easy. You can install both as a standalone server (Mac OSX) and deployed as Tomcat app (series of WARs). The standalone version uses Tomcat under the covers.

The demo flash apps included in the install were:

An app acting as as video broadcaster
An app that records a video stream to the server using flash
An app that is a chat room
An app that uses Shared Objects
A couple others…

They all worked fairly well, however, I ran into two problems. The first problem was not related to Red5 but that Flash did not recognize the video drivers (using an Intel MacBook Pro) and I had to change the preferences for Flash movies to use the USB Video Class.

The second problem was that the video quality was a little rough for the video recorder. Still working on the issue, please leave a comment if you have any ideas.

Finally, I found a great video tutorial site that covers some basics to setting up the Red5 server. It also, helped me setup a free development environment for Flash movies. Check it out – http://www.flashextensions.com/tutorials.php

Some of the videos are really basic and geared towards actionscript developers – i.e., setting up Eclipse – but I found some of the others pretty useful.