Steve: Welcome everybody to session 603, Delivering your Media. And today's session will be handled by the following three gentlemen Ken Waagner, Michael Shaff, and Austin Shoemaker. So, I'm going to hand it off to Ken then.

Thanks Steve. Hi everyone.

So, today we're, the session is Delivering your Media. And basically what we're going to talk about the band Wilco, who Michael and I do a lot of work for. We basically went and done all of their web and online operations for the last six or seven years.

And we're just going to really talk about how we've used QuickTime really from the very beginning of my getting involved in the band in 1999 and then all the way up through the release of their current record which came out about a month ago, which is called Sky Blue Sky. And we're just going to go through and talk about some of the things we've done in the past and some of the things we currently do and some of the things we'll be doing in the future with the new developments in Leopard and QuickTime and stuff.

So, we'll get rolling on that. I should go back to that slide for a second so I don't just blaze past it. We're going to talk about the web and the website and how we've used the website with Wilco. We've really kind of, when I started working for them my whole target was to really get them to sort of use the web as their base of operations.

Really, the hub of where people would come to find information about the band. And I know it sounds like a really novel concept but at the time it wasn't really happening for them and it wasn't really happening for a lot of bands. It was a still a relatively, basically bands weren't, didn't seem really to be using the web very effectively.

There was a lot of confusion at the time. And they, the band were really willing to kind of forge ahead with this concept of using their site as the place for all things about them. At the time they were signed to Warner Brothers and they had a record that they, they had three albums out. And they recorded their fourth album, which was called Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. They delivered the record to Warner Brothers. And Warner Brothers rejected the record as career sui- They basically said that the record was career suicide.

So, the band ultimately got the record back from Warner Brothers. And about a week after we got the record back we put the whole record on their website for free streaming. In the process of the band fighting with the record company, the record actually ended up leaking on the P- to-P networks and was out there pretty prevalent.

And ultimately as soon as the band got the rights to the record back we just decided that if people were going to be looking for the Wilco record the best place for them to find it would be on the Wilco website. So, we put it there and we made it available to everybody for free.

This was in September of 2001 and basically the record didn't come out until May of 2002. And at the time when the record came out everybody was like, those guys are idiots man, they just gave the record away for the last eight months or ten months or whatever. And when the record came out it debuted at number 13 on the charts and sold 56,000 copies the first week out. It has done seven, almost 700,000 copies to date.

And the most records the band had sold prior to that was about 230,000. So, from that point on they really bought into the whole concept of really using the web to really effectively kind of reach more fans and reach a larger audience. So, we've used QuickTime and streaming media across the band's site pretty much exclusively for the last, last six or seven years. we're going to talk some about live web casting. We're going to do a little demo or at least show you some of how it's done.

That's one of the things we started doing with them in 2002, Apple release QuickTime Broadcaster. And I had been doing some stuff in the web casting space up until that point. And Broadcaster really just seemed to make it really easy to do and really simply achievable. And so, we started by the seat of our pants. Michael and I started doing live web cast with the band in the fall of 02.

And now we're at the point where we basically do one a month. We go out on the road with the band and we'll kind of do live web cast and then make archives of shows available. We'll also talk about media players. And we'll show you how we've kind of integrated those across the whole website and across enhanced CDs and across file distribution.

We'll talk about the enhanced CD and we'll show you we've done some pretty neat things with web links on the CD where we were able to publish content to the CD, updated content all the time. So, it's sort of a reward back to fans. And then some of the new stuff we're going to talk about is some of the XML and RSS implication and showing some of the ways we've used that across the site currently and some of the ways that we're looking to do it in the future. And that'll pretty much get us rolling.

So, basically with the website it's like my real goal, prior to starting to do the Wilco website I'd done a website for a booking agency in Chicago called the Billions Corporation. And they had about 100 artists on their roster. And in the process of building their site I went around and looked at about 100 band's websites. And again, this was in 2000 I guess it would've been.

I didn't see very many good band websites. And from seeing them all you could really see the things that were kind of wrong with them. So, we really set out to just make the band site really simple and really easy to navigate and make things really easy to find for people, if so many times you find the sites are frontloaded with animations and just kind of like cute things. But, it's like as far as like, if I'm a fan and want to find out when the band's coming on tour or when the records coming out, or I just want to see photos or I just want to do one particular things.

We just tried to make it really easy for people. And the other thing I tried to do really with the site was just make it really an open canvas where the whole center guts of the site is just really, I can do anything in that space. And we were able to do photographs and streaming video and just different presentations really be able to use that space. And I'll show you a little bit more of the site in a bit.

From the web site we started when originally when I did the stream of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot I didn't really know a lot about what I was doing as far as like the whole kind of stream, I think I just hadn't done that kind of oriented. And I had a 29 dollar and 95 cent a month hosting site. And the first day that we put the record online we did 15 gigs of traffic.

And so, I almost got shut down by the hosting company. But, over time we started to really do these streaming players. And on the last record, on Sky Blue Sky, we basically really set out. We started, the record came out on May 15th and we started back in November and December really setting up what we wanted to do. And we decided to work within this framework where we worked everything within a 600 by 400 pixel space.

And we just were able to kind of put everything into it. We started with the week the record went to press. As soon as there were promo copies out we knew that the record would immediately begin to leak on to the P to P networks and would be out there and start to circulate.

So, what we did is the week that the, as soon as the record went to the press, the record went out to the press on like a Tuesday or Wednesday. And that weekend we launched a stream of the full album from the site. Initially we just did it for 24 hours. Then we did it for a week. And then about six weeks out from the release of the record we put the stream up, I'm sorry we put the stream up of the record full time.

And then we were able to just, through the adaptability of this player, which Michael built. We were able to change and just throw a bunch of different content at it. The band did a DVD of 45 minute live in the studio, a DVD that was a bonus record, excuse me, a bonus DVD.

And we were just looking for a way to kind make people more aware of it and give people some feel for the content of it. So we did a preview of the trailer. And then about a month out from the record we did a live web cast. And we sort of did everything within the same framework.

And the player's just been really incredibly adaptable. Michael, it's basically all built with XML and QuickTime. And we've really just kind of got it together where we can really make changes on the fly pretty, pretty quick. So, we went out in April. We did a live web cast from Australia, which was an audio only web cast.

And then in May, a week after the record came out, we went to London and we actually did two web casts live from London where we worked with still photographs and streaming audio. And we've used this still photograph thing pretty successfully as far as a live web cast. I think one of the things of, of the live photograph thing is it's made, certainly for us, it's made web casting a lot more achievable.

We don't have the budgets to really go out and hire a camera crew, shoot a 20- or 30,000 dollar production. But this way, we're able to put concerts on online. Like at least once a month we're able to bring them to the fans. And it's all for free from the site.

So, that said we're going to get into our first demo here, which is going to be about web casting. And we'll kind of explain sort of the, from the front to back of how we do it. And Michael's going to talk more about it because he's sort of the brains behind the operation.

And I just am there. But the first part we're going to talk about it the inputs. And we're going to show this to you as we get into the, we're going to demo some of the tools that we use and everything. But, basically what we've done with the Wilco shows is we do an audio feed from the sound board and the combine it with room mikes in the room and try to get the fans a real sense of presence of being there.

And then combine that with some type of t a live visual experience. And like I was saying, we found that the photo thing has worked really well. So, at the point where we've got it coming into the computer we're kind of creating the, we've got our content then we've kind of have to figure out how to put it out online. And Michael came down to talk about that so.

Michael: Right, as Ken was saying, we initially use QuickTime Broadcaster, which indeed got us online simply but it also taught us some lessons about what things we would want to be able to control. And one of the things that we found was we needed a more sophisticated input model.

So, you have these various inputs, say the audio and you've got the room mikes that you're bringing in, you've got the visuals. All of these are going to be encoded at some setting. And we'll show you what settings we use. We're using MPEG-4 for the visual and AAC for the audio. But we'll show that in the actual app. Now it gets to a machine.

Now we thought occasionally that we were bigger and better than we really were. And we would try to put multiple data rates on a single encoding machine. Now if you ever want to invite pain in a live situation this is a good way to do it. So, our first rule of thumb became one encoding machine per data rate.

So in our diagram up here we have one very beefy looking machine. But what we actually use is a number of laptops. So, we will, I think the current laptops are called MacBook pros. I have to say that very slowly because I say sometimes older names. Anyways we'll have a number of these set up based on how much, how many different data rates we are going to do. And that will encode it and put it up to that big cloud. Now, what is that big cloud? And I want to split this into two parts.

The first one is if you're doing a small event with anticipating a relatively small audience, at that point you could be beaming or reflecting to a, you know and exert and it could certainly handle a number of simultaneous streams. I don't know what the current spec on that is. It would be a good thing to test. But you're basically beaming to one machine. And then that machine will handle all of the requests from the audience.

In our case we're dealing with a much larger audience to an international scale. So, we actually use an edge network. We use the Akamai network. And we again stream to one place that then is replicated basically around the world. And so, somebody in Bangladesh is going to get a stream that is originating from relatively close to where they are. And we experienced this quite directly when we did our first international show. We were web casting from Australia, Sydney Australia.

I had to get up at 3:20 in the morning, which is not something I usually do in order to set things up. And at four, about 3:40 we went live. And the first people that we saw were from Iceland, and Bangalore, India, and places that I don't normally get to interact directly with. And we'll show how we can interact directly with them in a moment.

But, when you have that type of a reach, and that large of an audience, then a single machine, at a single location could be a most unfortunate bottleneck. So you may need to pair up with some of the streaming services that are out there that can have either a cluster of machines. I could tell a funny story about Warner's but I won't, in which we took down a very large piece of hardware. Because, it's not how fast the CPU can go it's how many shovels can get in there digging out the data.

So, you need to be able to handle simultaneous streams that's the function. If you're looking at potentially 10 to 50 simultaneous streams that's going to be one class machine. An exert can certainly handle that. If you're looking at 25,000 simultaneous streams you're probably going to need either a cluster or some type of an Edge network to help you out.

Now, in our case, on this diagram I want to draw your attention to number two where it shows a laptop. And in this beautiful diagram made by Apple it only has an arrow going up into the cloud. We actually wanted to turn that around because one of the things that we found was go figure problems happen.

And so we actually needed to be able to complete that loop. And we're going to talk a lot more about what I mean by that. But, basically if you want to be able to fix situations on the fly, you're going to need bi directional communication. And the wonderful thing about the QuickTime API is it's actually all there for you to use. And it's based off of XML, which is just text in a formatted way.

So I think we can move to our demo. We're going to start off with talking about the input selection. And then we'll move over into the encoding and the network settings. And then we'll move over to what the client side looks like. And I'll talk some about some of the fault tolerance that we've built in order to better serve fans.

So initially when we started web casting, like I said we started using QuickTime broadcaster. And at least initially to get audio online it worked really well, because of the fact that we weren't doing video it ended up not working so well. So originally we did, when we first started kinda trying to implement a visual aspect we came up with this idea of doing the slideshow. And the first time we did it was with REM on their greatest hits tour in the fall of 04.

And, so we were doing things pretty caveman like. We were basically publishing the photos to a directory as they were coming in, putting them on the server, and then manually updating an XML file to tell the player how many photos were in the file, then all the transitions and everything were pre built into it.

Cut to about a year ago or so and we kinda became aware of this program Wirecast that I had had my eye on for a little while. And we finally were able to get a hold of it. And basically it's ended up really allowing us to really put across a much, much more professional presentation and it's been a lot less pain for us as far as doing that.

So, we're going to walk through the whole Wirecast kinda set up initially without getting into great detail. So the initial thing for us is setting up the audio, which does, obviously the audio's the most important thing because they're a band. And with Wirecast it's basically you can add, you can stream, I believe, three channels of audio simultaneously.

And what you do in the audio shot is you basically select your input. And your input can pretty much be anything from a fire wire device to your internal line to a CD, an MP3. You can pretty much drop anything into the audio bin on the program here. And then just basically select it and assign it to your shot.

And so, as you build a new shot, you've got your audio layer put into place. And normally we use a couple of different things. We use an M-audio a FireWire 410 box we just bought M02 ultra light box, which we started to use. And we just kind of experimented with different things. We also have an M box on the road with the band full time.

So that took basically, we either do just a straight 2 mix out of the sound board or we'll do the 2 mix augmented by the mikes to again try to get the presence of the room. And then there are these three layers in Wirecast, which are the back panel, the normal layer, and the foreground layer. And those are literally layers that you're able to assemble on the fly.

So what you're doing, it's literally like a video production sweep that's all built, that's all software based. And so, what it gives you is the three layers of images and you can stack, you can do a stock background and then you can do photo's on top of it and you can bring video in on top of it. It's got really extensive transition, which we'll show you a little bit of. But we won't get too far into it.

We're able to just, you can see where we've got a new shot. The way it works is on the left hand side is the preview window on the right hand side is the live window. And as you add things in it automatically loads into the preview window so you can see what you're doing.

There's also the auto live button at the bottom, which be careful not to have it checked if you're not ready to go auto live because it's instantaneous when that's set. And then from, with here then there's a third, a third option within Wirecast, which is the titling layer.

And we found that to be really helpful because it basically gives us the ability to add kind of professional looking titles, which you can design yourself. I can show that even just built into the program there are a variety of pre configured backgrounds and templates that are. You can pretty much find one to do anything that you sort of all different kind of styles. And again, you can design your own as well. And you can do trippy and you can do really trippy and you can do all kinds of stuff.

So, that's kind of some titling and then in here it's like, again on the fly what we do is we put the titles to the songs into the player on the fly. So as the band's playing we'll load the titles into the player. And then literally it's as simple as hitting go and it's pushing out live online. From there it comes down to the settings of how that's going to be optimized and depending on what it is kind of setting the optimization settings and Michael will kinda walk you through that stage of using the program.

Michael: Oops, don't do that inspector.

There we go, the danger of using someone else's machine. Okay, so what we have here starting off from the top is our different presets. We have two machines that we or two ports that we actually port to a primary and a secondary. The secondary we will typically use for our low end stream and the primary for our high end stream. And if we get desperate and our primary or secondary is not working we'll kind of unify that.

You know, of course you can name them. We only use the announce to QuickTime streaming server. But I know that it also has the ability to have a built in streaming server so that you could actually have this machine be your, both your encoding, your, you know, you production, you encoding, and actually the machine that was handling your server.

At our level of audience, that really wouldn't work, but for a smaller audience that might be possible. Then you're basically giving it the host, which is just you, know the IP or the DNS, and then where to find your SDP file. I'm not actually going to try to go through the intricacies of SDP for two reasons.

One, I would get confused myself, and two what we've found is that when you're using the announce to QuickTime streaming server in the Apple way it just works. And that is a good thing. We also will be supporting different bands. So we will have a different user and password here for that. At that point, you know, it's pretty much done on the networking side. And then for my encoding settings. Excuse me.

Okay so down here we have our own web Wilco ones loaded on this machine. And you can see we're using MPEG4 we're doing that versus the H264 because we still have a sizable QuickTime 6 audience. If we had more machines on the road we could actually have a separate machine that was doing H264 and another one that was doing MPEG4. And then we're setting our size. We like to match the exact size of our players so that it completely encloses that area, your quality settings.

The frames per second, we do it at 15. We tried it at 18. We rarely find the situation where we need to be at like 30. And typically we don't know exactly what the venue is going to support until we get there. And we'll use tools like Net Monitor in order to see exactly what the upload is capable of doing. And then we've got to split that upload from between the visual and the audio.

So, typically we'll give, you know, since we're a band based kind of production, we want to give a good rich audio sound. And we'll do anywhere from 80 kilobits per second to, if we have a very low end kind of connection at the venue, all the way up to like 192. Yeah.

If we're feeling lucky.

- Michael: If we're feeling lucky right exactly. And then our video we typically like it to be at 300 but we'll tone it down if necessary. 300 would be kilobits per second.

Should point out that that's for still photos actually so that's one of the reason why we're able to push at 300 on the video is just because it's just still photos.

- It is still photos but during the transitions we want to have a nice frame rate and all of that will be encoded on the fly by Wirecast and put live. Alright so, let's take a look at one of our streaming clients.

I can go to the archive.

There you go.

Michael: Okay, road case is our area where we swap in current content. And right now we are featuring the archive of our London show. I click on that and after a moment or two our QuickTime media skin pops up. Notice that the. ( Music ) Could you turn the audio down a little bit for the machine? Thank you. Maybe even lower, there.

So, on this to start of this is a QuickTime media skin so I have the complete control over the shape and the user interface experience, maybe even mute it. There we go. So, as much as I like Jeff I don't want him actually singing over me. And we have complete control over the look and feel of the experience. So, there's not QuickTime branding here. There's no Apple branding going on.

It's strictly us. And you can see that we are using it from end to end. Yes we could put holes in it or make it strange shapes. But what we've found is that this kind of postcard motif works very well for road travel. Down here we have kind of our own controls, and in this area because we're doing an archive we are able to chapter track through I said.

Chapter track.

Michael: Chapter track through, yes the demo God's are toying with me. They said you were too confident today. So, I should be able hit that fast forward arrow and go to my next chapter track and being that I wrote that code I don't know why it's not working.

But what I really wanted to show you were two other areas that have come about as we learn lessons. And we're hoping that because we suffered this pain and gained this scar tissue that you folks can learn from our mistakes. I think this mike is live and why you kept rising and I just rose.

So, the first thing that we came across was, hey, we really want to know what's going on with, oh I know what's going on. ( Silence ) Okay, now everything will work including the chapter tracks. See I can step forward and there's my next chapter. If I press this kind of chat button right here I come into a chat environment that is on Wilco World.

And live in real times there are two different areas. There's a show area where the fans can talk to each other and enjoy the show. And there's a support area, because, sometimes things go wrong. The types of things that can go wrong are people are behind routers or their speed setting is set too high and they're not actually able to support it.

There's any number of problems that can happen. And when they first come in they're in the support room and ask, can ask us any questions. And while we're running the show we'll actually answer them and point them off to support pages. The other thing that I wanted to show.

Is this info panel, when you press on the question mark it will actually go out and do a basic diagnostic on what's, going on, now right now everything's working. So, it's telling us hey, you know, we've got our connections established, we know what version of the operating system you're using and what your QuickTime version is.

It tells you whether you're working on a high or a low stream. That can be part of the diagnostics. It also, the media status, these are all points where things could have gone wrong. And there's no way that I want to talk a user who really wants to listen to the show through finding all these things in the various kind of system panels or wherever they might be hidden. So, I bring them all up into the immediate experience.

Also what time the music is at and whether or not it's playing because sometimes somebody can get very excited and actually hit the stop button. And they want to know what it's not playing. Well it's not playing because you stopped it. And this will point that out. And now these processes down below are actually ways for me to know whether or not there's a possible bug.

I do do them sometimes, a possible bug in the player. So I'm actually taking a look at my own state. All of these things can be put into the chat environment. It can be fixed and then they can close out. You would not believe how happy people are when you actually have a human being that helps them out and their problem is resolved in a matter of moments.

The amount of positive feedback we get from support issues is enormous. And I can't kind of over state that enough. I mean we are talking about delivering your media. But ultimately you're delivering your organization as well. And if there's no organization to back it up it can be a very frustrating experience for the user. And they will take that frustration out on your organization, alright.

Cool.

Michael: I think we're going back to demo slides, yes.

Yes. So, that's just a little run down of how we do it. But I would really encourage you to check out Wirecast and just kind of experiment with the web casting thing. We've done lectures and we've done conferences and we've concerts and we've done a variety of different things. And it's really a neat tool. And it's, when we first started doing it we had somewhere around to about 10 percent of the user base or probably 15 percent of the user base had broadband.

But now we can find that, we find that about 97 to 98 percent of our user base has broadband. So one of the things Michael was talking about was the whole, we use the support pages and just kind of the interactions with the fans and the chat and everything to really kind of like deal with the fans and give them, try to give them a positive experience. It's one of the things that I things that I think has really made the Wilco website successful has been the fact that we've really, you know, tried to, you know, show the fans some appreciations for in turn appreciating the band.

And one of the ways that we set out to do that was with enhanced content to really kind of give people back some additional incentive to buy the record. Again with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was the first time that we had done the enhanced CD. And that was one of our things was because of the fact that the record had been online streaming for free since September of 01 and on the P to P network since July of 01, the record was coming out ten months later.

And to try to incentivize people put enhanced content on the CD with deep links where we were able to publish content. With first record, with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, on the one year anniversary we did, we gave away a bonus EP which was five addition tracks that you could only download via the enhanced interface on the record.

And what we really have tried to do with Sky Blue Sky is really try to like reinvent the album experience. I talked about how, where, as the people's expectations or the audience expectations are changing the music industry has really changed from sort of a physical goods based business to more of and experienced based business. And that's what we've really tried to do with Wilco. It's really kind of shifted to where the album really has kind of come to life.

And we're able to publish things into it constantly. And that's really what we try to do. So, we're going to now just show, Michael's going to launch the, enhance the, we're going to do another demo from the same machine. And Michael's just going to show what we've done with the enhanced content on this record. It's the first record where we've really offered people multiple things right off the bat. So, if we can go to demo on is it.

Michael: Machine three, I think.

Yeah. There we go.

Michael: Alright, in this side over here what we have is a dual partitian CD. The first partitian has your audio track just like one would expect. The second partitian is our enhance content. And for those of you who got to Peter's talk yesterday you would have heard him mention reference movies.

This is a great example of reference movies. We're basically pointing out to a place on our server where we know we're going to put things. And, we actually want to do a few tests before we even get there because we've learned the hard way. We actually test to make sure that certain components have been loaded in the system.

And so, if we have any possible errors that we can detect we'll catch them at this point before they've actually gone to the network and had, you know, further complications and will diagnose them right there and wills how a status of what's missing and how they can resolve it.

If I was really brave I would force a failure here but I'm not that brave. At that point please click here and we launch. And we get another QuickTime media skin. After it's loaded it gets rid of the previous skin so that it doesn't kind of cloud their focus.

And what I have here are four different buttons. I can download a special track, an enhanced track that was only available through this interface. I can also get wallpaper. I'm going to save the RSS feed for later and we just saw kind of the archive. Now, on the face of it it's, okay so there's four buttons, so what, it's just a movie with four buttons.

But, all this is being fed by XML. So, if at any point Ken calls me in the middle of the night and he says, hey, you know, we need to move things around. We can respond to it. By using XML you put yourself one step back in which you can actually modify where things are going to go and then be ready for those invariable problems.

If your organization is good enough where you never have any problems you can ditch this part of the talk. But, most likely, your organization is very similar to ours and problems are right around the corner. XML and describing where things are and having your assets looked up dynamically is a much safer approach than to actually hard code them in.

You should tell the, the ghost is born antidote.

Michael: Ken reminds me to tell the Arch type story. Ken's in Chicago and I'm in California, which means he's got two hours on me and a lot more often times. And I started getting calls at a very early hour, and again, I don't tend to do very early. And they were desperate calls. There's a big problem, Ghost Is Born has just come out and it's not working.

So, I went well we've tested that a bunch of times. So, I was not actually sent the final release of the album, not yet. When we looked at it we found that somebody in the fabrication process had changed the name of the disc. Well that, unfortunately, changed more than a few things. This is before we had learned some of the scar tissue. So, we were actually looking to make sure it was the right named disc. And of course it wasn't the right name disc and it immediately locked everybody out.

So, at eight o'clock I got this, eight o'clock in the morning. And I looked at them and went hum. I said aha, I know the answer. All I have to do is change my XML, point it to a new location. I'll update it so that it's no longer as restrictive on the titling and it will work. And in about two minutes later I could tell Ken, hey, tell the non such people that everything is working.

And they were able to have the same CD, which was already in their computer because they were all freaking out about it, launch the enhance content and have it work. So, it's that level of responsiveness that I think is valuable from this type of an experience and this type of an approach. Should I go to the RSS?

No because I'll show it in a second, so.

Michael: Then we're done with this one yes.

Oh yes.

Michael: I'm going to close this one out.

And we can go back to slides please.

I'll try not to, how many people up here are like familiar enough with XML or MRSS or use it that I don't really need to get into like elementary. Cool, a pretty good show of hands. But I'll kind of cover it in base. So basically, or you should actually cover it more than I should. But I'll talk about it a little bit.

What we've done with more and more we found XML to just be amazing for us to be able to kind of port information across various areas of the site and various servers. And just, we've just found multiple applications to use it on the bands website. And originally the real thing was data both for what Michael was talking about with the publishing and the enhanced content and that type of thing. And then as we got into audio we started using it just to kind of feed a lot of the players and feed all the previews and everything like that and then video as well.

And we're going to show you just some different places that we've used it within, we've just shown you where we used it within the web cast and within the enhanced content. But we'll also show you some different areas that we've used it pretty effectively from a bands perspective and we'll kind of go to that now, which, if I can go back to the same machine again for another demo. I'll just go back and show this stuff real quick.

So that, on the band's website, the first thing that was kind of happening was the band, they tour about 150 shows a year all over the world. We have 50,000 people on their mailing list. But one of the problems is, is that when we announce tours they end up kind of it'll be a three week tour and the dates will kind of come in over a period of a week or so.

We'll get confirm dates and we'll be posting on the website. And we've tried to get the fans used to the fact that we can't publish or send out an email every time that we post a date or every time that we do something. So what we try to do to encourage people to be able to stay up to date was, we did a tour dates RSS feed.

And all it is, is an XML feed of the dates that we kind of published simultaneously as we're publishing the dates on the band's site. So people are able to go on and basically subscribe to the RSS feed which is at the bottom of the tour dates page.

And when they subscribe to it, depending on what their news reader is it will show them the whole list of dates for the band and we're able to kind of build in ticket links and everything like that. This is in Safari. It really depends on the person's newsreader.

But it works within like the Google homepage you can have it just it'll just show the tour dates with the link for details. In that news wire it displays differently but it's really adaptable because it's just information. So that was sort of like the first, where we first really started to implement RSS on the site.

With the record coming out out we wanted a way for them to be able to publish all the news and reviews of the record that were coming in. and this provided us a really neat eloquent way to do it and for them to do it. Basically we've got their publicist using the application feeder. They're able to publish an RSS feed of all of the news, all of the reviews that go on with the record.

And in Safari it works pretty well because the neat thing is that they're able to attach attachments and images as well as the full text of the article. So, in this way they're able to kind of, oh she's got some broken links in here. but basically you can go in and just browse the headlines or you can open it up and you can view the whole, you know, like basically the band's entire press kit.

So, that's another way that we ended up doing it. Then we got into rebuilding the discography section of the band's website. And with that we ended up doing it, initially we built it all in Flash and it's all just basically a Flash file looking at an XML file. When you select the record it tells the ID of the record and basically loads all of the preview. So, I think I muted you.

Michael: Did you probably mute it centrally? You probably muted it centrally.

Alright, okay. So anyway you can go through, the fan can go through and basically check out every record and be able to preview every record. And the website's wilco world dot net. Feel free to go there and check it out if you want. But, this is just another way that we were, it was really handy to be able to kind of like manage the content and manage the assets on the site and then just really be able to kind of present them in a variety of different ways.

So, we basically have one centralize discography XML file that has all of the Music in it and all of the titles and everything. And that's ported across all the individual album pages and everything like that. so, from there we kind of got to the point where one of the thing the managing of Wilco has been it's has been a complete word of mouth phenomenon really. The band has never really had a lot of radio play.

They've never gotten a lot of video play. They're kind of like, they've been around for ten years at the point where I really, well not ten when I started working about eight when I started working with them. It didn't really look like they were going to have any, you know, like any more upward growth at least by traditional means. And so as we started to use the website it really started to build.

It really was a word of mouth phenomenon especially with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, that record in particular. And what we wanted to do was, when we got asked to do this we sort, they asked us to try to come up with some really like new ideas and different ways that we could kind of, you know, kind of step the site up to another level and do some things that we, you know, that we though would be cool.

So they were kind enough to introduce us to Austin Shoemaker here. And Austin basically and us, we work together on redoing the, really the discography kind of rebuilding it in a different way. And so I'm going to turn it over to him and he'll kind of explain to you what he's done there.

Alright can we go back to slides? Okay, so what we built is called Wilco MixTape And the reason why we built it is we were thinking what if we could combine the rich media experience of QuickTime with the social element of the web application. And so we went and said okay, how do we build this using completely open standards and QuickTime.

So, what the Wilco MixTape site lets you do is browse the discography using the same XML file that powers their Flash discography and select a few tracks and put them into a MixTape and send it to your friends over email. And when your friends receive it they can see it and play it back.

And the most cool thing about this is it was completely built using open standards like H2ML, CSS, Java script, and it talks to QuickTime over Java script. So, I think the best way to show you what you can do with straight up web standards is show you a demo. So let's go back to computer.

Okay so this is what it looks like. On the left you have a list of all their albums. And when you mouse over an album you get a track listing. So I can go through and see all of the tracks of each album. So I can go and say let see I want to play this. Well no, and so then it plays I right now. And I can listen and I can say hey is this a good song. Yeah it's a nice song but I'm going to try another song.

This one I like. So now I can just drag it and drop it into this track listing. So, I'll go grab another song like, now you can, you can sort of go through and listen to songs. So this is like a good way to just discover the music.

And in addition, you know, you have the social element. So, now I can go in and grab one last song and say this one. So I can insert it anywhere here but I'm just going to drop it at the end. And I can say, you know, my mixed tape.

And send it to person at where dot com. Hey check this out and then I quick send and off it goes. And this is what the receiver sees. It's basically what you selected in another page; when you click on it, it starts playing the song right away. And you see the full album. And so the cool thing about this is it's all built in Java script. So all of the content's fed in from the XML feed.

So, if you had a completely different band or a completely different application you could, you could go and put in that XML and it would look completely different. So, anyway we think this is pretty cool and that's the next tape. So let's go back to slides.

You went to the demo. So that pretty much I mean, we went pretty quick, he blazed through his demo. But that's alright. We're, that's pretty much it.