Hello, everyone. Thank you for coming, especially on a Friday at 2 o’clock, last session of the day. Truly appreciate you guys. So the title of this session is Infrastructure and Deployment Techniques for Large-Scale On-Demand Content Delivery with Macs, and actually iPhones and iPods as well. So that’s a mouthful.

But what we’re essentially going to talk about today is deploying these large-scale media deployment solutions in hotels, cruise lines, and then at large-scale companies all across the world. So my name is Juan Fernandez, and I cover the Apple Hospitality Group for the continental U.S. There’s a team just like us in Europe that handles hospitality over there. And with that said, let’s get started. So we’re going to talk about these solutions, again, on three main areas. Large hotels.

This could be anywhere from 200 rooms to, if you guys saw the paper today in USA Today, Fountain Blue just announced and finally went public with 6,000 rooms, 3,500 in Vegas and 1,000 in Miami. So this is our first hotel in the U.S. that is gonna go all Macs in every room. That’s an iMac in every room. We’re also gonna talk about cruise ships and what we’re doing at Royal Caribbean.

They’re deploying their first full Mac ship, one Mac mini in every crew and also in every guest cabin at the end of the year. That’s the Celebrity Ships Solstice that we’ll talk about. And then finally, we’ll end the session with a company called Burbank Eau Claire, great partner of ours, developer, and what they did for the company Tetra Pak. And Tetra Pak, if you open up your fridge, pretty much every container in there is made by Tetra Pak.

And so their podcasting solution and social viewing, really, solution that they rolled out is just phenomenal and really took podcasting to where we really wanted it to be. So with that said, we’re going to talk about every aspect of the solution. We’re going to talk about the back of the house all the way to the front of the house, the end viewing situations, the five that we’re going to concentrate on, the methods for ingest, which what you’ll find is that all five of these areas are common to every single application. And you’re going to see three applications that are quite different, but actually have the same core feature set and technologies that they leverage.

So again, we’re going to deal with the ingest and capture side. We’re going to talk about asset management considerations, whether to go with the partner-developed SQL database, for example, or to go with something off the shelf, like, say, a Final Cut server. We’re or if you go with your company SAN, or whether you have to create your own storage unit to go with a ship, for example, or, say, a smallish hotel that’s in the middle of nowhere that has no real data center.

How do you handle the storage of all that media? We’re also going to talk about the distribution head ends. That’s essentially the XSERV components that we’re using for IPTV and VOD. And then the client-side considerations, whether it be an iPhone or an iPod Touch or a Mac Mini or an iMac, in the case of Fountain Blue.

Okay, so the technology frameworks that we’re going to talk about today and get into are the live sources, the ingest cards and or analog sources. What you’ll find is that every system that we have here that we’ll talk about can really handle pretty much any kind of media in and then purposes that for the end user in a very rich, rich way. The asset management, we’re going to, again, talk about Final Cut Server, QMaster, and Episode Engine, like they used at Tetra Pak, and then NAS or versus SAN.

And then lastly, again, we’ll talk about the head ends. And in that instance, we’re going to talk about QuickTime streaming server or Broadcaster or, again, Wirecast, which we’ve used as well. And then finally, the off-shelf solutions such as QuickTime that we can use as well. So with that said, let’s get started into the first case study. You’re probably wondering why Apple got into this in the first place. Every hotel that you guys have been at or have stayed at in the last year, you’re probably finding your experience at home is actually very different to what you are finding in a hotel room.

So you’re finding that channel changing is probably between three and four seconds. The quality is not quite HD. Even though you can get that at home, you’re not getting that in a hotel. And there’s really no differentiation whatsoever. So you could stay at a $100 travel lodge or you can stay at a $6,000 a night mega resort in Vegas and you’re gonna find the exact same TV watching and VOD experience. So that, quite frankly, needed to change. And it’s the hotels that were actually asking us to help them with this. And that’s really where we excelled. So those are some of the limitations. How we solved it was leveraging the best things that the Mac could offer.

And we essentially took the two basic components, IPTV and VOD, so thousands of movies, and episodic TV, and live free-to-guest is what we call it. And we took all of that and we packaged it up somewhat like like what the Apple TV would do for your home, we rolled that out for hotels and really addressed, in addition to those basic block and tackling areas, we, because of the system, are now able to touch almost every one of these areas that a hotel didn’t even think they could, you know, impress a guest with. So some of them are pretty amazing. For example, poolside cabanas, we’re looking at using iPhones to be able to order at a VIP booth in a nightclub, for example, to be able to adjust DJ playlists on the fly. Very, very unique things.

Enabling an iPhone when you walk into a hotel to become self-aware. So hopefully, you know, the idea is for every hotel to really create their own custom iPhone app so that, you know, as a loyalty program, you can log in to, say, the W Loyalty or the SVG Guest. And so when I walk into a W Hotel, for example, it becomes self-aware. It says, hi, Mr. Fernandez, you’ve just arrived. Your room is all set, your movies are queued up, and your music likes are all set.

And just so you know, last time you were here, you liked sushi, and we’ve gone ahead and made a reservation at Nobu for you at 8 o’clock. Please let us know if you’d like to change that. I mean, talk about a completely different guest experience, and that’s really what we’re doing. We’re also touching, obviously, the interim piece. That’s where the VOD and the IPTV come in handy and really transform the guest experience.

And then taking the concierge idea and moving that away from just the lobby to everywhere on property. So, again, being able to ask for anything, and, you know, the W, for example, has this phenomenal slogan, whatever, whenever. And we’re really trying to bring that to the, you know, the best of the hotel brands out there. So with that said, let’s get into the actual solution.

The technology frameworks are, they could have been a lot more complex. We really try to keep it simple. And, again, this is because we’re essentially deploying these in hotels that could be anywhere. So these had to be zero touch, and they had to be able to be self-maintained to the point where a technician at the hotel could be alerted by pager that there’s something wrong with the mini, and they could just essentially go straight up to the hotel room, unplug the bad mini, put a new one in. It would essentially boot itself up, reinstall whatever software patches it needed, and in a zero touch way be back up and running so that the guest didn’t even know.

So on the server side, every single one of these solutions has a partner-enabled database. This is where we are essentially acting as the glue between the PMS systems that are at the hotels, and we are taking all of the data that is in there with a whole bunch of other guest-specific fields that we’re adding, and then we’re basically pushing those out to the client side. That’s built on an SQL and XML-driven framework.

On top of that, we’re using third parties such as Wirecast or QuickTime Broadcaster, for example, to act as the real-time streaming server for the media, be it Unicast or Multicast as well. And then we’re using ingest cards from, say, Aja or Black Magic to do the actual ingest and then the stream out. Everything is built on Mac OS X server. Everything runs on the XServe, and before the XServe RAID and now the Promise RAIDs as well. And then on the client side, we’re using the same SQL and XML frameworks that the server side uses, but then the client side just redraws it dynamically.

And we’re talking not just dynamic by property brand. We’re talking about a level of granularity where, you know, me as a guest, I don’t want to see 30 channels of TV. I only want to see the Sci-Fi Network and CNN and Bloomberg. And so when I log in, my channel changing experience is three channels. And my movie watching, instead of 2,000 movies, we’re customizing that to say my genre like. So all I want to see is a season of Battlestar, for example, and a couple of movies. We can do that per guest per stay.

That’s really phenomenal. And again, we’re drawing all of this through QuickTime, Core Animation, Core Video. These are all the core services that we’re using that are inherent to the Mac that you really cannot do you know, flash environment or some of these other more 2D spaces. So with that said, this is what it looks like.

We’ve condensed this to a two rack, and we’re ultimately going to remove the right-hand rack. That is the one-channel in and then the play-out server. The idea is to just keep it to the left-hand rack, but there’s some technology that’s not out yet that’s going to allow us to basically do that.

And what that is is we have to take a Scientific Atlanta box and we have to reduce it to a dongle. And if we can do that through some of our-- you’re laughing in the back, but it’s true. So if we can take the Scientific Atlanta box, which essentially takes native IPTV transport streams, if we can take that through our third-party WAVE provider who negotiates the deals with the movie studios, this dongle will then encrypt that and then allow us to remove, essentially, an entire rack of servers, which, if you can imagine, if we’re deploying this to, you know, 80 hotels, this kind of a footprint is sort of hard to replicate at every single one. But if we can manage it to one rack, will be in good shape. So this is what’s provided by the third party.

In this case, it’s Wave that we’re using for hotels. Again, Wave does the contracts with the hotels and handles everything from movie studio content negotiations, handling live TV for guests, much like DirecTV would or Dish Network. And then they put in their own hardware. And it’s essentially satellite receivers.

Two C-band antennas are resident pretty much on every hotel. They take that content in, and then they add a key server, which is essentially handling all of their forensic watermarking, session watermarking, which is, again, the movie studios require that. So regardless of what content provider you guys end up picking, make sure that they have those areas sussed out, because it’s not good enough to just say, hey, here’s our content. They really have to handle the DRM much like iTunes does.

All right, so moving down the rack, we have really the heart of the solution, And that is what we would consider the Apple knock. And so that starts with the admin server, and that is anything like, say, an ARD task server or a Casper deployment server. Again, to create a zero-touch environment, you have to have these things completely managed.

Next one down is the Apple IT server. Every single time that we’ve done this, we’ve found that it’s very hard to leverage the existing company’s DNS server and DHCP scopes and all this jazz. So all of the IT considerations, whether it be, you know, DNS, DHCP, all of that has to be housed locally, and you have to be able to control it and really tie it down tight.

The next part, the Apple VOD servers 1 through 4, this is a 400-room hotel, and so we sort of went with a little bit of an overkill situation here. We found through our testing at Royal Caribbean, actually, that we could do--for every one server, we can do 200 concurrent streams of HD, especially on the newer servers. The Intel ones are smoking.

We decided to, again, for a hotel scenario, we wanted to double that. And so that’s the only part that scales. So as you go for larger hotels, that part of the rack would increase. And again, one server for every couple hundred streams or 100 if you’re being safe. The next two are the CommandPoint servers. Now, CommandPoint is a product by Nanonation. Nanonation is the partner that we’re using for a lot of these hotel opportunities.

DirectStreams is doing the same thing, by the way, in Europe. In fact, they’ve actually deployed it at several hotels live already, and they have something very similar on the back end, too. The command point servers handle everything from guest services needs, all of the calls to the database. They drive the GUI on the client side and send those XML calls to them and also handle the media and when to queue it up and when not to.

And then finally down from there, from the queue logic switch down, is all just an XAN. So for hotels, as opposed to cruise ships, we actually didn’t deploy a SAN on the cruise because, again, we sort of wanted to go with, you know, best-case scenario, you know, we didn’t want it to be a whole lot of maintenance. So for the cruise lines, for example, we just had local data replicated per server.

For a hotel, it’s stable enough that we felt we can go with a real SAN and really shrink it down. And XSAN allows you to do that, you know, put an entire SAN within a few U. And, again, with the two promise rates that you’re seeing here, we’re delivering just under 10 terabytes of live storage, fully redundant, which is beautiful.

So that’s essentially it. This half again, this is eventually going to go away. Towards the end of next year, we’ll have a dongle by our provider that’ll pretty much eliminate the need for this. But the purpose for these right now is to take any ingest source through a Kona card and then stream it out live.

All right. So the final component is the in-room piece, and this is what that essentially looks like. It’s overly simplistic, but that’s really what we’re doing. We have a Mac mini or an iMac, And we’re giving the guest or the hotel a choice. What we’re finding is that in suites, they’re putting, believe it or not, a couple of iMacs.

And then they’re using a Mac Mini to drive every TV. All right? So that’s essentially it. I want to show you the demo of what this sucker looks like. Now this one is branded Hotel Castagnoli, who’s actually one of the owners of NanoNation. I wasn’t able to get the Fountain Blue demo up and running, but-- to be?

That was my salesman snafu versus my engineering know-how right there. OK. So this is the Hotel Castagnoli. And this is what we’re pitching to hotels as sort of the-- this is the entry level. It looks pretty good. And we’re giving them the ability to sort of replace what it is that they have now. So we’re covering IPTV, VOD, sort of the basics, and the guest services features, as well as music. But the idea is to go significantly beyond this. And that’s what we’ll show you with Royal Caribbean.

But this is the essential feature set. So again, you notice they come in. The idea is to be able to have their own pictures uploaded to their hotel website from the guest. So when I check in, I have my home pictures up and running already as my own screen saver. It greets me with, say, messages.

If you’re subscribed to a conference group, for example, we have that metadata as well. We capture that, and we deploy it and say, sir, just so you know, this is your agenda for the week. And all of this would be splashed live. And then with a very simple remote, much like the Apple remote, or we’re actually control for integration with being able to do the door to drapes tie in for the entire room. They would provide their own remote. But for most hotels, they’re going to have a small custom-made remote and you’re going to be able to go to any of the features that are here resident. Let’s go into one that most people want to see first and that’s movies.

So, Ratatouille, again, the idea is to be able to take thousands of movies and instead of having the guests -- I mean, they could if they wanted to. But instead of having them scroll through 2,000 odd titles, that becomes very difficult. We customize it by genre, by their personal taste, and we kind of show them the pertinent ones that they have here.

We also have the ability to capture their session data, so that when they’re watching a film, when they log in, when they check into the next hotel, same brand, same guest experience, they can say, hey, you’re watching “Ratatouille,” you’re halfway through that, do you want to pick it up where you left off? Beautiful. Very, very, very cool. So again, we can just click. watch a movie, and in HD it starts to stream, again, from the extras on the back end. And it looks pretty fantastic.

Go back to the menu. If you notice, it’s a little tough to see, but if you notice, QuickTime is actually rendering both layers. This is something that is inherent to the Mac that we can do, and only we can really do well. Through other demos that you’ll see today, you’ll notice a lot of compositing happening on the fly. These are the kind of rich media experiences that you don’t see elsewhere.

Open a music. Again, we can tailor this to the guest. The idea is to be able to take-- we aren’t able to take their iTunes libraries and move them to hotels, but we are able, through the hotel negotiations with the studios, to be able to offer entire music libraries and catalogs directly catered to the guest as well. And again, you can just click and play and listen through a very immersive and very rich media experience.

And again, with a click of a button, they’re back to their navigation screen. And I personally cannot wait until this is in a hotel near me. The Fountain Blue in Miami is going to be the first one at the end of this year. So this is channel changing. There is an inherent lag from about three to four seconds or so that is inherent to HD as we fill the frame.

And what hotels are doing right now is, you know, with a thin client model of the Linux box running the TV, there’s really no way of accelerating that. With the Mac, what we’re doing is we’re sort of mitigating that what we’re considering the next generation in channel changing.

So we believe that if we can give the guests the ability to really just look at the channel that they’re trying to find, the game, for example, so you don’t have to click up and down and wait four seconds and then find out that’s the channel that you didn’t want, they can quickly skip to ESPN and then start watching the game live.

All right, so that’s channel changing. A couple of the guest services features that we had in this demo specifically are things like iChat. We think that social viewing that you’re going to see Tetra Pak talk about in just a bit, this is going to be key, being able to allow people to chat. You can already see it, I think, on Virgin Atlantic where they’re allowing different seats to sort of chat to each other.

But it’s very hard because you really don’t know who is in these different places, even if they have the same kind of likes as you. So what we’re empowering these hotels to do is really allow them to capture guests sort of birds of a feather preferences. So when I check in to, say, a cruise ship or a hotel, I can find other people with similar likes and then chat. So that’s essentially what we’re doing in the hotel space. Thank you.

I think we’re still listening to that music in the background there. All right. So the next one that we want to bring up. Thanks, Anthony. So that’s what we’re doing in hotels. The next one that we want to talk about is the cruise lines. This is actually the first one that we started with.

Hotels came as a natural progression of this. Three years ago, we started talking to Royal Caribbean. And we placed a gentleman at Royal Caribbean, Anthony Palermo, who’s just a phenomenal talent. And he’s really the architect for what we did there. And with that, I’m going to let you run through what we did there, Anthony. Thanks. All right.

Hi, everybody. So at Royal Caribbean, we really strive to give a great guest experience. And that guest experience today also includes the ability to use an IT infrastructure, digital infrastructure to offer information, education, entertainment, and hopefully a lot more in the future. So ships are very unique because they are hotels, but they’re very advanced hotels. And I wanted to give you guys an idea of the ship IT ecosystem.

And with that said, Solstice is the first class of ship that we’re deploying. There will be about three or four of them. But to give you an idea of how big Solstice is, there’s about 8,971 ethernet drops on the ship. So that’s pretty big. And everybody that I talk to says that there’s enough cabling to actually touch the ocean floor. So I guess it depends where you are. So the second class of ship that actually we’re rolling this out is called Genesis. And Genesis will have about 5,000 cabins, and there’s actually 16,000 ethernet jobs. So just to give you the idea of the complexity.

Also, we started using Layer 3 network. This gives us capabilities with MPLS tagging. This is a very advanced network that introduces also network virtualizations for virtualizing the VLANs in Layer 2. So we found ourselves with a very complex back end and with an infrastructure that also holds a lot of different IT architectures. And just to give you an idea, we have all these different clouds of IT systems. And we wanted to bring in another cloud, which is ours, with the ability of talking and talking nice with the existing infrastructure.

So when we brought in ICE and digital signage, we looked out to different vendors. And Apple was really the solution because of the modularity that was introduced to us, the hardware architecture, and also because of the NanoNation software development. We already had a huge amount of database infrastructure that we needed to talk to. And they brought all that together through SQL and XML.

So if we take a look at the Solstice deployment, Solstice deployment is very rich in media. When we started designing the architecture, we went in with digital signage, which already resides now on the Freedom Class trips. And it’s already deployed on three ships, which is Freedom, Liberty of the Seas, and Independence of the Seas.

On those ships, we actually have Spa Fitness, Guest Services, and Wayfinding. That’s our digital signage. And pretty much, they’re all very interactive. We’ll have a demo of the Spa. But with Wayfinding, you can actually pinpoint locations on the ship where you want to go, like a bar, or a pool, or arcade, or whatever it is, and actually show you, give you directions.

And that started as a two-layer project, but that’s evolving too, and it’s very interesting. We added the ability also of shore excursions, which means that a guest-- usually what a guest does is before they come in the ship, they’ll go to the website, and they’ll start booking some excursions of ports of arrival.

And now we give them the ability on the ship to actually expand in that so that they can continue to book and have the same experience. And also have a calendar to management so they don’t have to double book or anything like that. And then ICE is really the bigger portion, which is our in-state entertainment system. And this is all driven from the Mac minis at the client side.

On the server side, we actually have two data centers on the ship. One is the broadcast data center, and the other one is the IT data center. So we drive the information from client to servers depending on the needs. In the broadcast servers, we’ll have all our VDN demand servers and all our, like, TV stream servers. and then in the IT data center, we’ll take care of everything that has to do with, like, net booting and imaging, DHCP, DNS, and all that stuff.

Challenges. So the one thing about challenges is that I can actually point out a lot of challenges that we had as we moved along and as we started designing. And we always saw that we went into having more need to really discover the services that a server, an OS server, can give you. And I’m going to list a couple of them. But what we found very interesting is that when we had a challenge, OS X Server was the response.

When we had a challenge with the soft integration, the Nano Nations system was the response. So we had everything we needed in our environment. We didn’t have to go out now and try to integrate other systems with ours. It was always a response to our challenges. Interacting with the existing IT system and protocols, of course, trying to integrate without disruption.

Multicasting, we found that we had a very strong multicasting system. We use multicasting both for TV streams, but we also use multicasting for ASR remote imaging. And in the warehouse where we stage everything, because we go through a staging phase, we actually were able to have concurrent, 1,000 concurrent remote imaging through multicast. We actually multicast a 3.5 gig compressed image in about 15 minutes.

But I like to push the limits a little bit, and we actually were able to do it at five minutes. So we had about 1,000 clients image in five minutes. But they told me to slow down. Concurrent VOD is also very interesting. So this is the unicast footprint. And for the unicast footprint, we actually had the same test.

We would take ARD and we would simulate tests about guests in their cabins or crew members in their cabins and actually playing concurrent video at the same time. And again, we found that we don’t have an XAN implementation yet, but we’re looking forward to it. But at this point, we actually got very good results through the QuickTime streaming server and the content on the RAIDs, on the server on the RAID system. We had an average of about 200 high definition 6 megabits per second streams.

And you take all that with all the video demand servers, and we made sure we had extras just in case, and we actually were able to stream 1,000 streams concurrently. So if you do this kind of benchmark, make sure that you don’t start all the streams at the same time.

Just start some streams at the beginning, then let more streams come in, so then you can really benchmark your hard drive and all that good stuff. We talked about remote imaging. And remote imaging, we had very good results. And we also did it through VLANs, virtual VLANs. So we’re very happy to have seen that happen.

Of course, the ability to send multiple unit commands to multiple machines. And Apple Remote Desktop is really your day-to-day tool to do a lot of this stuff. And it’s a great tool. That’s all I can say. The last point is going back to the fact that we found extra services that we never thought we were going to use on the server side.

So we live in this Layer 3 environment where we’re in a cloud, and everybody kind of sees everybody in a Layer 3 environment cloud. And security came to us and says, well, you have crews, you have guests. We have to give different policy based on IT. And the result of that initially was to statically map all the MAC addresses.

But the nice thing about OSN Server is that it gave us the ability to, through DSGP filtering, to import a list of MAC addresses and to limit the allow and deny of different groups. So we were able to take a couple of servers, do our DSGP services, and not have to statically map 3,500 computers. So those were some of our challenges. So like I said, before we actually go on a ship, we have a warehouse, and we stage our ship.

Our initial deployment, our initial staging was actually 100 Mac minis and a couple of TVs that actually are on the ship. But then we went to the second stage, and we actually went out and built out 1,000 cabins. We have a converged IP network. So we use the digital infrastructure for ICE and digital signage. We use it for VoIP phone systems and so forth.

So what we did is we took our Cisco equipment, we took the Mac equipment, we took our TVs, we took our phones, and we put them in there, and we tried to run 1,000 at the same time. And it was a pretty great experience. It’s really nice through ARD, again, to be able to run everything.

And all of a sudden, you see all these movies playing on all these TVs and so forth. Also, we took advantage of tools like QuickTime, where you can actually take a look at the packet loss that you may or may not have when you’re running video in demand or video streams.

So for me, what was very important is to be able to look at the network. And I found that one of the tools that are my companion at this point is Wireshark. So any tool like Wireshark, where you can actually trace the network and take a look at the sessions, gave us the ability to understand if there was any packet fragmentation.

And it was very important so that then we could adjust the MTU size on the ethernet MAC addresses because we were living in an MPLS network, which adds more tag to the headers. So tools like Wireshark that allow you to actually see what’s going on have become very important. This is a diagram of our broadcast room, our broadcast data center. It’s basically an expansion to what Juan showed you guys before. Now, we receive the information for DTV live channels through a satellite stream.

And then from the satellite stream, if they’re analog, they get converted to digital. They get imported to our TV servers, which are XSERVs. One-to-one with Ajax, Kona cards at this point. When the ingest is in the servers, then it goes to Wirecast, which is basically the application that then encodes in H.264 the content. Those then actually talk to our network backend, which is a Cisco 4900 with a 10-gig uplink.

And the other portion of the broadcast room is actually the video-on-demand servers. So we have video-on-demand servers. We have RAIDs. We have our NAS environments. Then we have the command point servers that take care of all the SQL, XML, talking to the other DB infrastructures, infrastructure on the ship. And then all that communication is passed on to the clients.

Sorry about that. There you go. So all that communication that’s coming from the broadcast room is passed on to the clients, whether it’s a public area where you may or may not want to show some TV channels, or video in demand, or specialized content, or if you’re in the crew or guest cabins.

So same thing for the IT data center. This is a representation. We have all the necessary failover with the servers. Again, we have all kinds of-- about everything that’s in Server Admin that’s a service that you will use is a service that we actually took advantage of and are using.

So as you can see, you have your DHCP services. You have open directory. We found it very -- it was a very good thing to be able to create policies for different groups of hardware. So we also took advantage of open directory net booting for remote imaging. And then we have two IMAX that are basically the admin machines and, of course, any portable that use ARD and the -- and are able to reach the nanoNATION command tools. And again, all these services then talk to all the clients.

So that’s our infrastructure. And with that said, I think I have a couple demos to run right now. One last thing, I guess, manageability. Again, manageability is, I think it’s very personal. Each one of us decides to manage in a very different way. What I found out through this process is to focus on keeping your management as simple as possible. Know your tools. Know your tools. Know your tools. ARD is your friend. Treat it nicely.

You can create plenty of groups in ARD, so you have your computer groups. Take advantage of things like smart lists, because they really reduce the amount of time that you have to interact with ARD to find stuff. And schedule recurrent tasks. For example, we use that to schedule-- there’s a lot of time zones when you’re on the ship. So we actually use ARD to schedule tasks to change the time zone on the ship. All right, so I’m going to go to a demo and show you guys some of the things that we do.

So what you’re looking at here is the actual… Hello, my name is Sarah, and I’m your day spa host. I know you’ve been busy rock climbing, surfing, and exploring on your vacation, so I’m here to help you sneak some indulgence into your busy schedule. Please feel free to touch the screen at any time to learn about our spa, salon, and fitness services. So we can go ahead and actually have these beautiful 60-inch screens. These are actually driven from Mac Pros and not Mac Minis.

But you basically can go in and take a look at all the different things that are happening in the spa. They show video, they’re educational, and really represent what we can give the experience that we can deliver. Did you know that the average cruiser gains one to two pounds daily? The Ship Shaped Fitness Center.

I see that you’re interested in the spa. Great choice. And I’m speaking from personal experience. Now all you have to do is figure out which treatment to have. So many choices. Would you look better as a… To say you’ll walk on air after this treatment is an understatement.

This is the most… And this is an example instead of wayfinding, where you can actually pinpoint locations. And you can kind of want to know where the casino is from where you actually are. Spy is located on the 11th floor. It will help you actually arrive to the location.

And then the other demo I would like to show you is the actual front end, what the guests are seeing in their cabins. So what we’re about to see is actually the ice system in State Room Entertainment. So here again, you have the option to be able to look at information that interacts with POSs and PMSs and be able to select your account and view your folio information. There’s GPS integration, so you all the time know where you are.

We have a calendar, so you can take a look at your reservations and what you have booked already. We get RSS feeds to actually take our content that usually is printed content, and now we can actually deliver it to the guests in a digital format. We offer very rich internet experience and TV movies. And then we go into things like restaurants, so you’re able to book your reservations or choose some wine for in-room service. Of course, we’re going to pick the-- We’re not connected. I didn’t bring my 20 servers here, so. But that was it.

Thank you, Anthony. All right, so that’s what we did at Hotels and Cruise Lines. So the third case study that we’re going to talk about is what the company Burbank Eclair has done for the company Tetra Pak. So up to the stage, we’re going to invite Jurgen and Leonard to run us through that. So thanks, guys.

Yeah, as Johan just told you, I’m running a company called Burbank of Clare. We are a media consultant company located in Stockholm, Sweden. Most of our customers are usually found in the telco industries and creative markets. But as we will see here today, we also have customers which we can say is completely non-IT related.

And we are here today to talk about the iCast Video Project, which is a global content management and distribution platform for digital video. The project was made to make awareness and accessibility of digital video within this global organization of Tetra Pak. And to present the company and give you a quick background of this project, I would like to introduce to you Leonard Hogberg. Thank you.

within a department called eCommunications. We’re responsible for our internet sites, our intranet, and other e-related channels such as what we’re gonna talk about here today. First, I wanted to give you a little background on what Tetra Pak is. When people ask me, “What does Tetra Pak do?” I usually answer, “Check out your fridge.”

To be a bit more formal, we’re a family-owned packaging and processing solutions company. We’re actually one of the world’s largest beverage packaging companies. And last year, we shipped a stunning 137 billion packages to our customers. Our development is always aligned to the tenet once stated by our founder. A package should save more than it costs.

But, oh, and if you’ve had coffee this week and had milk in it, that’s our packages. So we had sort of a challenge, which we’ve been working with for like one and a half, almost two years. Altogether, we’re more than 20,000 employees. And to communicate with people all around the world is obviously a challenge.

We started out actually the whole project by looking into streaming, live streaming. That was our mission from the start. The thing is that we’re actually worldwide, and we’re located in 150 countries and over 200 locations. So streaming wasn’t really a very, very good idea. Just to give you a hint, I mean, in the States here, in most parts of Europe, getting a good internet connection is no issue.

But if you start thinking about South America, Middle East, Southeast Asia, and not mention Africa, it’s starting to get tricky. We use everything from dedicated fiber to DSL, dial-up, even satellite connections in some places. So streaming wasn’t a good idea. So we started thinking, how can we do this in a different way?

It all boils down to a number of basic principles behind this. We wanted to have a solution available to anyone everywhere. Since we’re a large company, there are a lot of people producing video. So it needed to be available all over the world. It also needed to be extremely simple.

So what we required of the solution was that we had one-click publishing. Now we also wanted to utilize the videos for different purposes, and thus we needed multiple different output formats. We wanted it to be simple, as mentioned, and we also wanted it to be 100% digital, no analog stuff.

Easy administration and so on and so on. So, in addition to that, we actually set up a digital video delivery standard to get our suppliers, because a lot of suppliers provide us with video. But mostly it actually comes on DVDs, which are then distributed using DHL or similar, and that’s not very 21st century. So we want to have a digital day one.

And the cool thing about this is that this standard actually fits on the back of my business card, which you then can compare to, for example, Swedish national television, who have a delivery standard that is 14 pages. On the other hand, they have to cater for analog stuff. We don’t.

So in addition to this platform, which we’ll look more into detail in with Juergen in a minute, we also built our first on-site studio. It’s complete with a green screen, including a guest host setup where we can record interviews. And we did this together with a Swedish film production company.

We wanted to have professional lighting, professional camera angles, so we had a stage set decorator, lighting, sound, very good sound in the studio. Now the cool thing here is that together with iCast Video, the publishing part and distribution, we can actually record a three to five minute video suitable for consuming on the web in under half an hour. So that’s pretty cool. So, Jørgen, tell us a bit about how we did it. JURGEN LINDBERG: So going from the requirements to a full scale solution was quite an interesting journey. We had a lot of changes over time for the requirements.

We’ll see here how we made it. For this presentation, we have split the workflow into five different segments, starting with the studio, which Lennart just told us about. In the studio, we have three high definition cameras, which are connected over FireWire to our studio room. In the studio room, we have a computer, which are running Wirecast. where we do live edits. In Wirecast, we also have made a couple of templates for the green screen and for the different cameras, so we can add titles and stuff like that on the fly.

The recordings from this Wirecast are then sent to the Upload Tool. And the upload tool is an AJAX-based small program where we can add some information to the content, like title and description. This text will be the metadata for the content. We also grab some information about the user who uploads the content by doing some Active Directory lookups. After the upload tool has grabbed all the information, the content is then being sent to our transcoding part.

And the transcoder are running an application called Episode Engine, which we perhaps have heard about earlier this week in a lot of different sessions. Episode is really cool, because it’s making use of all the CPUs in an XR. So in our example, we have eight core XRs. And we utilize them 100% all over when we are doing encodings. All the codecs-- not all the codecs, but a lot of codecs are multi-threaded. And so are some of the filters.

And if there is need, we can do distributed encodings over several machines. So this is really a scalable solution. So if we have a lot of demands for a faster workflow, or if we get a lot of content at the same time, or we see that for the future that the content workflow will increase, we just add some machines. And we will get much, much faster transcoding all over. The transcoded outputs are then sent to the storage.

And instead of setting up a new storage specifically for this solution, we decided pretty early to go for the already in place enterprise storage. It’s connected directly over virtualized OSes. We tried that, but it didn’t work pretty well. So we decided to go for a Linux OS instead. This Linux OS has Samba shares to the SAN and also do some NFS mounts to our transcoders so we can have the transcoders see this SAN like a network attached storage instead.

For distribution, we are using this on Apache standard web servers with MySQL and PHP. We have our RSS 1 and 2.0 feeds, as well as ATOM feeds, which you might have seen that Podcast Producer 2 will have in a year. To make this available for the end user, we have a Web 2.0 AX user interface, which Lennart will demonstrate in a while.

On the web page, you can play content directly. You can also download all of the different output formats available. And as we see here on the slides, it says feeds are everywhere. And you will see what that means in a while. And the most interesting part for this workflow is the audiences.

And we have defined three different audiences types. First, the personal consumption, where you have your content in your iPod or iPhone or directly in your computer, like playback, or in old cellular phones, like I don’t mention any brands here. You see we have three different output formats. The M4V file, which is standard H.264 and AAC file. We have the 3DP release 5 compatible file, which makes use in almost any mobile phone who can play video. And for the web playback, we have a Flash 8 file as well.

When there’s need for larger audiences like today, we have an MPEG-4 file in high definition, also H.264 and AAC. And for a lot of users in the company who uses Windows, they usually need a PowerPoint file for their presentation, so it also adds a Windows Media 9 file available for download. And finally, We have the social viewing experience, which Lennart will talk some more about.

The whole idea about this social viewing thing is, I mean, we have the personal stuff where we watch the content on our iPods, our phones, et cetera. We have it during meetings and presentations. But what we wanted to create was more a place for people to meet. So what we’ve done is to build lounge-like areas where people pass and set up a large screen TV together with an Apple TV that then subscribes to the high definition file from the ICAST video service.

Now the cool thing here is that people start talking when they actually watch the videos. So that’s sort of what we want to touch. We’re pretty early on this yet, but we’re going to set up four of those stations in different parts of the world after summer and hopefully get some measurable effect so that we can roll out this on a wider, broader basis. Let’s have it check out the interface.

At the top, we have what we call View Master, where you can see previews, small flash previews, to get people to watch the videos. We’ve used Ajax quite extensively in the application to get more of a feeling of a TV rather than a web page. Now below the View Master, you have the actual video. What we did there was to hide the background information to get a nicer experience. So for example, the description with links and stuff to other things is hidden behind the actual video.

There’s the formats tab where the PowerPoint version is. There’s the HD version that is used then on the social viewing hubs, the iPod iPhone, old style phone, and of course the original, because we want to keep the original for any future repurposing. So you can also comment, and then we have a rating function that we actually haven’t turned on yet. Now here, as you saw, when you click the preview, then the video starts loading, which makes more sense given the network infrastructure that we have.

Below is a little information on who’s published it and so on. And as Juergen mentioned, we hook up to Active Directory to get who actually published this. On the right-hand side, you have the navigation with the tags, categories. You have the calendar. As you see, there’s the subscription to a tag, because you can subscribe to categories, to tags, to search even, and to date. I don’t know what that’s for, but, so feeds are everywhere. Finally, we have the upload function, which is then available to anyone, anywhere. You just click upload, you get this little upload tool. You pick the file that you want to publish.

This is a fake file, though, so… You choose the aspect ratio of the video, which you unfortunately have to do. Confuses a few users. We want to get rid of that. You fill in the title, the description. You choose a category from the ICAST video site, and then some tags.

When you click “upload” here, you will receive an e-mail when the transcoding is ready. And if it’s a big file, now is a very good time to take a cup of coffee. So let’s have a look at how it looks later on in the changes. Yes. And since we are using RSS feeds, we can subscribe to these files as podcasts. So heading over to iTunes, we have the files available there in the podcast section, where we can see in the description field is all the metadata we just added in. the upload tool.

So heading over to front row or in our case on Apple TVs and our social experience hub, we have this kind of view. We go to the podcast and your episodes and you can start playing your movie just uploaded and distributed to the Apple TVs. So files in this Apple TV are as we said earlier high definition 720p files, making the experience pretty nice for the end users. So this is how it can look.

And what about the future, Leonard? What do we have there? Yeah. Mike. One of the-- well, social viewing, we’re extremely keen on looking into what that really brings us. We truly believe that this is going to be a totally new communications channel. That’s one of the most interesting parts in this. And for these social viewing hubs, we think that the standard interface we have today in the Apple TVs, They are good, but we’d like to try to make some changes to them to make them work in our environment.

Distribution. Yeah. What would be really cool in our situation with a network would be to actually have those little devices, whatever it is, to use torrents. Because then we could actually exactly adjust to a local place, how much it’s allowed to download and upload and so on. And that would utilize our network infrastructure in a much more efficient way. So that’s also one of the things that we have in plan for the future.

And since the content is downloaded to the Apple TVs in these hubs, why not make use of these Apple TVs even more? Like, download all the content for the different purposes and have they act like local proxies for these specific localized sites around the world, instead of downloading them straight from the central server. So that’s it from us.

Thank you, Lyneth. Thank you, Juergen. Awesome, awesome stuff. So to sum up-- let’s get back a slide real quick. Couple of things that we want you guys to take away from this session, aside from the, you know, beautiful GUIs, there’s a real hardcore, real-world deployment set of issues that, you know, come up. So even though it sounds sort of rudimentary, project planning to be up there, these types of deployments demand it.

They demand project management, head count, actual real long-term thinking. Royal Caribbean took about three years, by the way, from when we started talking to them. We’ve obviously compressed that time frame, So when we start talking to a hotelier, we’re at around six months to a year before we deploy a full hotel.

But even though that timeframe has actually shrunken, the requirements are still there. Phase deployments are key. At Royal Caribbean, again, and like most hotels, we almost demand that they do a POC on site. That could be at a lab, that could be at their corporate headquarters. Definitely do this in phases. There are a million little things that can happen on the IT side that can sort of derail a project like this. and that can be anything from network configurations.

Cisco was, you know, part of the biggest challenge there. I mean, incredibly powerful network, but, you know, between QoS and a couple of the idiosyncrasies there on that kind of a network, it really took time to tweak it and really get it good. And again, things like hotels and in companies like Tetra Pak all over the world, the networking consistencies are just insane. So again, you know, definitely, definitely consider that.

Proof of concept phase deployments are good. And then again, think beyond the one-to-one delivery mechanism. I love what they’ve done at Tetra Pak with the social viewing hubs. We’re finding that in hotels and cruise ships, birds of a feather ideas, or areas where guests are being put together in areas where they can start to communicate, be it from their room virtually through chat or video or even in a lobby. And again, think beyond the box.

These are not shrink wrap solutions at all. What we are handing the, you know, in this case, the hoteliers or cruise lines, what we’re handing them are, you know, a subset of tools and a platform for development where, you know, it sort of failed in the past and the challenges that we saw in the past are that most of the solutions out there today require massive forklift upgrades and the moment you want to add any kind of a feature, like say wine ordering or anything like that, you have to replace the entire system.

If you want to add, you know, a new set of channels, you have to change the back end. Everything on Mac OS X server is part of a platform. So I don’t think there’s a single part of the solution you saw here today that doesn’t run on MacWiston server and Mac on the client side as well. So that’s about it, guys. I think we have some QA.