Active Product Development : 2008 : November

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Active.com currently uses Jumpcut as its video provider. With support for Jumpcut waning, we have decided to move our content to a new provider – BrightCove. BrightCove offers a newly updated product and an extensive API. We have already begun implementing BrightCove’s video player on some of our pages (see our Tour de France page) and we look forward to working with their services.

The difficulty, of course, is always in the details. You can see from our video edit page that Jumpcut allows videos to be edited within a web browser. These edits are stored by Jumpcut and when a video is requested, the finalized version is created on the fly and shown in a flash viewer. The current issue is one of retrieval. What is an effective method for making these videos downloadable? Requests to Jumpcut for this information have not been forthcoming.

Interestingly, another website, ClipNabber, allows users to download flash videos from video providers such as YouTube, Yahoo Videos, and Jumpcut. There are some Jumpcut limitations which prevent us from retrieving all of our content, but we can at least begin the process with some of our videos.

Once this issue of retrieval is resolved we can copy the content, titles and descriptions for transfer into BrightCove. More to come as we dive deeper into the migration process!

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Scaling results.active.com

Posted by JeremyGThomas Nov 10, 2008

results.active.com is our hub for communicating race results to people. We train event timers on how to use the backend portion of the system, and after a given race is completed the timers upload results, making them available to the world at large.

We typically see a lot of traffic on results.active.com after large events, such as the Marine Corps Marathon or the Chicago Marathon. And to be fair, results.active.com hasn't had an exemplary performance record when it comes to handling the volume spikes we get on the Monday after major events.

We've just released a major update to results.active.com adding 3X the scalability we had before. We've also made tweaks to the architecture so that we can add additional servers to the load-balancer should we get any unanticipated increases in volume.

So if you see any issues with site responsiveness please let me know (here on this blog) and I'll look to it personally and immediately.