Rudy Thurston, COO, Omnifuse

MM
So now we’re talking about content-delivery systems such as Akamai or one of the other guys. What we’re talking about is the ability to push large pieces of content out to the edge of the internet.

RT
Right.

MM
Across several thousand different servers.

So that it wasn’t all having to serve from one central server on your site, but from stuff that was already cached in the network.

RT
Absolutely.

One of the other painful lessons that we learned was as follows-we always provide an embed tag and a URL tag for every movie that we created-every Flash file that we created-so that members could put them on different profiles and different social networks.

When you get one or two that get really, really popular, you find the holes in your infrastructure very quickly. We’ve painfully found that out from our ISP when we had two of our videos hit YouTube’s top 10, and they started to generate 250,000 hits a day. It was quite overwhelming, at first.

MM
What were some of the behavioral or physical effects of having a YouTube hit on your business and infrastructure?

RT
The primary one was the bandwidth. We were consuming a tremendous amount of bandwidth.

Our bill went up, first. That wasn’t so bad, because we actually had our own dedicated pipe. Our own dedicated bandwidth, coming in. We actually host all of our equipment at a collocated facility, because it’s backed up and redundant and all that good stuff.

Yes. Our bill went up because our spike traffic went way up. But that wasn’t the most impact. The most impact was the degradation in overall performance of our network sites. So we learned the hard way about filtering, sheltering web-farms and all kinds of stuff.

We had some of that in place, before. But definitely not to the scale that we have it now.

MM
As a function of having a video-processing engine-a proven, video-processing engine-that was able to keep provisioning out content to all of the various players… whatever version they were on… And then this content-delivery network… If you had a big hit, that allowed you to buy bandwidth on-demand, almost. Essentially, all of the traffic was on the edge network as opposed to coming out of your server.

RT
Absolutely.

We went through that about a month ago, when three of the Skateboard videos on the Ignition site went to the top 10 on YouTube. Our applications experienced no significant issues or lag time.

MM
So other than a mature, maintained video engine and a world class distribution network, does any other criteria go into selecting a video service provider?

RT
One of the more subtle things that we were looking for-we were looking for a partner that built their technology on the same technology that we built our platform on. Microsoft.net and that enterprise-scale architecture. That was another reason for us choosing [on stream]. They had built their technology on the same technology that we were working with.

MM
Therefore you got a known devil as opposed to an unknown devil, and you knew what you were dealing with, to be able to integrate.

RT
Absolutely.

The secondary part of that was, we didn’t want to be the first person trying to integrate their solutions. We wanted somebody who’d been integrated and had done this UGV integration before, and been successful at it. Another key place for us where we selected OnStream. Because they’d been doing this for a long time. They have a very mature web-services architecture for us to call into and receive data back from.

MM
What were some of the steps, in terms of the predeployment? I understand you’re still doing production pilots or doing QA testing.

What are some of the things-if somebody is reading or hearing this… If somebody’s got a social network or corporate website, what are some of the things that they should put in place before they start integrating either social media-broadly spoken and broadly defined, and/or specifically as user-generated video-vis-à-vis a video services provider?

RT
The first thing is definitely a good partner to work with. Corporations definitely don’t. I can’t recommend strongly enough that a corporation definitely find a partner for doing this with them. There are so many pitfalls in the user-generated video. Adding those pieces brings great, great additional ways of getting content. Getting people excited. Rich media is just great for interactivity and stickiness. People love it. They like to consume that stuff.

But you want to have a very good partner, who knows the ins and outs of trading that content and distributing that content. There are so many places where it can be overwhelming and can fail quickly because of all of the different aspects of it. Finding that good partner is definitely the primary key to success.

Then just really understanding what type of rich media content you’re either trying to acquire through user-generated videos-or that you’re trying to produce and put out there to the web.

Those things-again-especially when you’re in a production facet, where you’re trying to create this content… Do you really need a Madison Avenue ad firm? And a Steven Spielberg production video? When it’s going over the web and it’s going to be consumed and at maximum 20-grains per second, and not HD?

The way that it’s going to be consumed should have a direct reflection on what production level it really requires for you to put it on there. When you’re looking at that rich media content, production quality isn’t the primary driver of why people are consuming it. It’s the content, itself.

So it’s not necessary to have the bells and whistles of a full-blown production. It’s more about the content and the type of content that’s being distributed to people. Some of the most successful videos on the web are shot with a cell phone camera and a person speaking.

MM
And you got to it earlier in the interview when you talked about how authenticity trumps everything.

RT
Yes.

MM
If it really is user-generated content, almost by definition, of course-unless you’re talking to a group of ad directors-creative directors-almost by definition, user-generated content is amateur.

RT
Yes. Absolutely. Even if you want to look at some of the brand name pieces. Like the Doritos commercial that was shot by the kid. He created a very simple, low-production Doritos commercial. One of the most successful Doritos ads, ever. It was created by somebody who loved Doritos.

MM
Do you see that as another development where you’re going to have user-generated brand stories? I won’t call them promotions, but they’re almost like testimonials. Yet they’re also homages to what a great product or service it is.

Yes. We’re definitely seeing a lot of people trying to do that. The problem is, again, the authenticity of it-and how authentic you can make it.