Chapter 5: Envisioning the Streaming Media Site


Envisioning is the first of the four-phase process that we use to design and build a streaming media system. In this chapter, we introduce a scenario about a fictional small company that wants to add streaming media to its Web site. We’ll walk through the steps that this company takes to identify goals for the site and brainstorm ideas for achieving them. We’ll also discuss what we want the end-user experience to be for this site. We’ll close this phase of the process by producing a preliminary project schedule and a list of tasks that will move us into the next phase.

The Scenario

Coho Winery is, for the purpose of this scenario, a small family-owned winery located in lush farm country east of the Cascade Mountain range. The winery has been a family business for generations and has relied exclusively on wine sales, tourism, and the occasional art exhibit or concert series for its revenue. Most of the tourism is a result of word-of-mouth, but the winery has advertised in local and national publications. It also provides brochures to the local chamber of commerce for handing out to prospective visitors.

The winery owners have decided to grow the tourism side of the business in the hopes that they will sell more wine and increase their revenue stream. Increased revenue will help them to cover the rising costs of maintaining the winery and enable them to expand their Art Series to include marquee acts that they are currently unable to afford. The winery owners believe that the Internet is one obvious solution for reaching more people, so they have recently designed a Web site that they host themselves. The Web site contains a history of the winery, photos of the vineyards and neighboring countryside, descriptions of some of the award-winning Coho wines, reviews from wine critics, and a program of recent and planned Arts Series events. Figure 5.1. shows the current Coho Winery Web site.

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Figure 5.1: The current Coho Winery Web site.

The Web site has been experiencing a better-than-expected level of traffic, and the owners are now ready to expand it by offering streaming media in an attempt to entice more visitors to the winery. As part of its regular tour, the winery shows a brief video that details the winery’s history and wine-making process. The owners want to put portions of that video on their Web site, along with clips of recent wine-tasting events, and a voice-over that explains all of the products and services that the winery has to offer. The owners will eventually want to sell wine and souvenirs on their Web site, but those plans are outside the scope of this book.

The winery currently uses frame relay to connect to the Internet through their Internet Service Provider (ISP), and they experience a maximum throughput of 1.5 megabits per second (Mbps).




Microsoft Windows Media Resource Kit
Microsoft Windows Media Resource Kit (Pro-Resource Kit)
ISBN: 0735618070
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 258

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