Evolving Search on active.com

JeremyGThomas — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 23:43:16 GMT

We've been listening to our users, like bikehugger, who asks "Possibly not enough coffee, but has anyone else just stared at Active.com wondering how to register for an event?" (http://twitter.com/bikehugger/statuses/998940596). Our users want to a) find the events to register for and b) run through a no-hassle registration process.

Here we're addressing "a" - making it easier to find stuff to do.

So we've been working to make search a bit easier and a bit more relevant. I'm happy to invite you to our highly experimental, closed search beta. The first 100 users can sign-up at http://labs.active.com/users/new, using the invite code "blogsearchinvite".

Watch this screencast to get a better idea of where we're headed.

Jumpcut to BrightCove

ActiveFergy — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:00:11 GMT

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!

Blog Posts From Active Product Development Tagged With video

Evolving Search on active.com

Jumpcut to BrightCove