Developing the Vision

With their vision in mind, the winery owners set about determining its feasibility. While it is easy to say that you want to add streaming media to a site, you must consider the cost and scale of such an endeavor. Successful streaming can be achieved across a wide range of scale and budget. The first step in determining the feasibility of a streaming media site is to set goals that are achievable given the constraints of your particular situation.

Goals

The winery’s goals for adding streaming media to its site are three-fold:

• To increase customer traffic on the winery Web site.

• To entice visitors to visit the winery where they will purchase wine and souvenirs.

• To build enough customer interest that the winery can expand its programs, including adding an online store to its Web site.

All of these goals can be summarized in one word: growth. The winery wants to achieve growth in its revenue stream, growth in its customer base, and growth in the products and services it offers. The first two goals are directly related to adding streamed audio and video. If the first video is done well, for example, it will encourage users to watch others or to read the related articles and information that is available on the site. This, in turn, could lead to an increase in sales of wine and souvenirs.

The third goal, to expand its product and service offerings, is really an outgrowth of the first two. It can be achieved in many ways, including through the use of streaming media.

Now that they have determined their goals, the winery owners can start thinking about how to achieve them. One effective method for doing this is brainstorming.

Brainstorming

The brainstorming process can be very quick or be spread over a number of days. It can be a formal process with specific deliverables or an informal conversation in the hallway. How you go about it and how long it takes really isn’t important as long as you leave the process with an understanding and agreement among all interested parties as to how you will proceed toward achieving your goals.

In the brainstorming process, the winery owners and staff meet to develop ideas for what the streaming media system should be both now and in the future. They realize that each member of the staff will have a different perspective and might have ideas that the owners have not considered. They also want to make sure that none of the plans conflict with one another or with the overall goals.

In the end, the winery team agreed to these basic tenets:

Content

The winery is in the business of making wine, not video, yet they want their streaming audio and video to be of good quality. Purchasing professional-grade equipment is not possible given their budget constraints, and learning to use such equipment would require more time than they are willing to invest. The winery has a library of videos that they use for internal training, promotion, and educational purposes. All of the videos were produced professionally for them and are stored on DVD. The winery decides to use these videos for the on-demand content they will stream.

Distribution

The winery does not anticipate streaming any live broadcasts now or in the near future. The owners have one Web server on which they host their site. While they can put videos on it temporarily, they are concerned about the amount of buffering time that users will encounter when trying to download the videos, and they fear that users will move on before the download is complete. The winery owners also want to retain control over their copyrighted property. They realize they can’t do that if the videos are being downloaded instead of streamed.

Playback

After conducting some research, the winery team has learned that many users who connect to the Coho Winery Web site do so over 28.8 or 56 Kbps dial-up modems. However, the winery often plays host to corporate events, such as holiday parties or executive retreats. Corporations usually have high-speed lines available to them. Because of the variety of ways that customers might access the Coho Winery site, any video that is produced would have to play well over a range of connection speeds.

Administration

Once audio and video are added to their site, the winery owners want to monitor the number of streams requested, the duration of each request, the amount of bandwidth being used, and other statistics in order to ensure their server is keeping up with the load. The results will also help determine their return on investment. If the response is good, the winery will consider adding videos, rotating audio and video depending on the the season, and including advertisements with their streams.

Schedule

The winery would like to have their system in place within three months in order to take advantage of the summer tourist traffic.