From the developers desk this week Thursday, October 26, 2006

This week most of the Light Cast Media developers were working on the Content Distribution Network. Uptime is important to us, because we know it is important to you!

Content Distribution and System Monitoring
This week we finalized core CDN code to monitor where the media files are routed. Example: You are a customer located in Atlanta. You log in and upload your files to the LCM network. Our system will know where you are, and route your files to our Atlanta data-center. Also this week, we improved our Edge caching system. Example: Your media is being watched by someone in California, and you are located in Florida. Our system knows that it is coming from California, and copies your file into cache to our Edge Server in our San Jose, CA data-center. We made the updates this week to give us a lot of flexibility as we scale out and to ensure high uptime and unmatchable quality.

Live Streaming
As much as I hesitate to publish this, here we go. This week we ran another test of our live streaming solution. We are working with one of our large churches and original "alpha" clients to tweak and hone in on an amazing live streaming solution for you. The initial testing is going great, and we have a nice solution mapped out. As it stands today, we look to roll out Live Streaming Q1 of 2007.

Stay tuned... Next week we plan on announcing a huge new piece of functionality. Yes, I did say huge!

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posted by Light Cast Media @ 2:38 PM, ,  

From the developers desk this week Friday, October 20, 2006

This week was a very productive week for the Light Cast Media developers. The goal of this weekly blog post is to bring you all up to speed on all the additions and changes to the Light Cast Media system.

Auto Player Positioning/Sizing
When a video is uploaded, the server automatically detects the uploaded video size. Now the player will always start out at the actual video size, which should mean no resizing, and fast video start times.

New Video Controls
Two new video players were launched this week. First, a "Thin-White" video player and and additional "No-Controls" player. You might be asking yourself, why a No-Controls player? Simple, we had a customer who requested it, so we added it.

Bug fix
We noticed that there was a minor bug where 10px were being cut off vertically from all videos. We would be shocked if you guys ever noticed this. However, it is important to us to strive for excellence, so we fixed it this week.

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posted by Light Cast Media @ 1:35 PM, ,  

Data Center Added in San Jose Thursday, October 12, 2006

Today, Light Cast Media added a new data center in San Jose, California. This new addition now totals 7 data centers in 6 geographical locations. Dallas, Atlanta, New York, San Jose, Amsterdam and Australia.

Why San Jose? Simple, many of our customers are streaming major amounts of content to Hawaii, and Asia. San Jose, California provides amazing low latency connections to those areas as well as Mexico and North American western states.

For the tech heads and security conscious out there, this additional data center is equipped with redundant UPS power and a diesel generator, advanced environmental controls including HVAC, gas fire suppression, biometric access control systems and a multi-homed network for 100 percent uptime. At Light Cast Media, we are fully committed to excellence, and meeting your every need. So enjoy San Jose, its a beautiful city...

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posted by Light Cast Media @ 8:08 AM, ,  

A few minutes with Seacoast Church Monday, October 09, 2006

Seacoast Church, lead by Sr. Pastor Greg Surratt, has been an active Light Cast Media customer for over 6 months. Five of those months were during an exclusive "alpha" testing and development phase where Light Cast Media worked with Seacoast and a few other clients to improve our core technology, build out tools and develop a complete understanding of what the mediaSTREAM product should look like. During this process, Shawn Wood, Creative Communications Pastor has been at the forefront of this relationship, and I wanted to spend a few minutes sharing a conversation with him.

Light Cast Media.
Shawn, what did your streaming media efforts look like before Light Cast Media?

Shawn:
 "We were hosting our own streams and using Windows Media player. The buffering time and quality were something that our IT director and myself were not happy with. We were looking at some in-house fixes when the alpha opportunity with Light Cast Media came. After looking at the product and the pricing structure we had an immediate...yes."

Light Cast Media.
Explain some of the challenges or problems that you were having.

Shawn:
"Slow load times, stalls and buffering when multiple people were watching. We also just did not like the look of the interface and were planning on a flash solution to help with that as well."

Light Cast Media:
How has Light Cast Media helped or improved those problems?

Shawn:
"I think that we have one of the best streaming experiences on the web today - church and and business sector."

Light Cast Media:
Shawn, when it comes to Streaming or any technology Seacoast looks at, what is important to you guys, and has Light Cast met your expectations or not?

Shawn:
"Met and surpassed with both product and service. During the alpha test our IT director has been able to help play a role in what Light Cast will look like and you guys have been awesome!"

Light Cast Media:
What significant "ministry" impact have you seen Light Cast Media offer?

Shawn:
"I am not getting the calls from people about the experience anymore. Also, we have been able to offer more video streams (i.e. ministry promos) in addition to the weekend messaged and not have to worry about the experience suffering."

Light Cast Media:
Lets talk money! I know that people look at your church, and the amount of campuses that you have and think your budget is huge for this type of stuff. Bottom line, are you happy with the cost of Light Cast Media's offering?

Shawn:
"Video streaming was costing us zero tangible dollars prior to Light Cast Media, but money is not the only true measure of costs. It was costing us in other areas that we could not afford to pay - our experience. However, that sounds good on paper, but there are still budget constraints and Light Cast Media has made it affordable to churches to get the best streaming that is available. There is no other company that even comes close to competing with the quality for this price."

Light Cast Media:
What's next for Seacoast? Maybe something technology related or anything that you can think of.

Shawn:
"We have some digital discipleship areas that are certainly going to be innovative and we think pretty monumental in the next 12 months or so...you can look for more info on Shawnsblogspot.com"

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posted by Light Cast Media @ 7:44 PM, ,