Leveraging RSS at Disney: from Collaboration to Massive Content
Delivery

Elisabeth Freeman, Walt Disney Internet Group Eric Freeman, Media
Systems, Walt Disney Internet Group Mike Pusateri, Disney/ABC
Cable Networks

http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2004/view/e_sess/4763

at the

O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference:
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/et2004

2-10-04

San Diego, CA

Cory Doctorow

doctorow@craphound.com

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Had to transition go.com from an expensive portal to a
free-to-maintain portal by pulling in newsfeeds over RSS and
XSLT-transitioning them to decorated web pages -- made it easy to
add new partners to the portal. Made it easy to wpit out to WML
for mobiles, and to re-syndicate to the rest of the world.

It took a while to show the powers that giving stuff away didn't
mean a net reduction in eyeballs-on-ads.

ABC News is now doing this.

We have a sticky issue around people taking content and
re-publishing it.


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Massive content delivery with RSS

Modern computers can handle large files, video, media, etc.

Want to provide experiences above the effective bitrate of our
users, and bits are expensive to ship.

Example: Added a high-quality video clip to the front page of
ESPN.com.

Came to think about the enclosure tag in RSS -- the idea of
asynchronously d/ling content behind the scenes. You can download
the experience prior to hitting the page.

Built a client-side technology -- espn.com, disney.com, etc -- an
RSS aggregator that d/ls and pre-caches video on the machine, and
communicates with the mothership to tell them who's got what in
the cache.

We wanted 500k users in 1 year -- in three weeks we hit a
million. Over 2 million now. Sustainign 2GB of bandwidth,
TBs/day.

Highly successful -- one of the biggest Internet successes from
Disney's perspective.

Enclosures scale -- we use non-peak bandwidth, edge-cacheing, and
the business model sustains the new cost.

This should be hooked into swarmcasting systems (like Onion
Networks' Tornado)

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Information flow with blogs

Complex orgs live and die by information flow.

Change must be communicated bi-directionally, catch up must be
easy, archives must be kept and searchable.

We keep "shift logs" of what happens on different shifts. Used to
be a custom FoxPro DB. Now it's a MT blog.

We didn't tell them they were using weblogs, we called it
shiftlogs, and they loved it.

We could skip email notifaction (which was overwhelming targets)
with RSS and provide an aggregator (Newsgator).

Easily scaled to adding shiftlogs for all the departments.

Because Newsgator integrates so tightly with Outlook, no one even
knows it's not email.

Created the opportunity for excruciating detail in discrepancy
reports.

We have to aggregate ratings information as well -- RSS solves
this.

In the future:

* News clipping services

* Playdate memos (when different programs will air)

* Switch to ATOM (we like its bidirectionality -- the ability to
comment on a feed, and buy off-the-shelf publish-back tools)

* Syndicate some media content (dailies, etc) for review



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Blogs and RSS are useful to business, and not just to share
opinions and find out about your users,etc -- it's info-flow

We need authentication and access control

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Wikis at Disney

Great way to capture insitutional knowledge. There's a ton of use
throughout the company (including DRM!)

Change-notification was key to encouraging participation


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