If I’ve been a little quiet around here lately, it’s probably because I’ve been really busy at work. Yes, even Keebler/Blog has a day job 
I hinted a little what I might have been up to, but we’re finally in public-Beta and I can just tell you: a new video player 
My development team has been working on this thing for about 4 months now starting with some scribbles on a piece of paper. The challenge was to replace the old CTV players with something that was more cross-browser, supported Flash Video, better organized the videos, had a better search, could handle hundreds of millions of streams a month including traffic spikes from two major news outlets, and could be built in the timeframe. Funtimes 
If you’re one of those people that likes buzzwords, here’s a few that this player uses: XHTML, DHTML, Ajax, CSS, Google, Permalinks, Friendly-Urls, Akamai, ASP.NET 2.0, SQL 2005, 3-stage deployment, CDN, Silverlight, Flash, Facebook, Digg, and Del.icio.us. Fwew! And that’s just the first version!
Some of the things I’m especially proud of:
- We are one of the first major media outlets to support Silverlight
- You can go to watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/south-park and it automatically goes to all the South Park episodes in the library.
- Works just as well on a Mac, as it does on a PC
- Has all 11 seasons of South Park
- Generally doesn’t suck
Over the next few months, we’re going to roll-out the new player application to as many CTV properties as we possibly can, starting with The Comedy Network this week. It’s going to be a busy 2008
So check out the player, click around, and tell me what you think here or on our work blog. Sorry, Americans. Most of the Comedy content is geofenced to Canada, so you might have to wait for CTV or TSN to see actual video playing. And I hope the number of South Park episodes doesn’t impact the productivity of your workplace as much as it has ours
Any idea where my PLAY/PAUSE buttom has gone on the comedy network video player? Seems to have disappeared recently. Using Firefox, Flash 10, and Leopard.
Everything between the video and the UP NEXT bar (as seen in your picture above) is no longer there.
Sorry, kyle. I don’t work there anymore so they’ve been up to a few changes since I left. Hopefully they’ll be back soon