Web Entertainment Systems

From an email I wrote to the SpinFlow group...

There's been much talk about building a Flash "player" lately.

The word "player" means very different things to different people and that is causing some confusion.

I find it useful to start with a real world analogy here...

What is an "entertainment system"? or "sound system"? or "home movie system"?

I think those are phrases most people understand, especially people who we'd like as members of a digital marketplace for collaborative media producers.

To me, these systems are usually collections of "components" that have been placed in a certain environment to provide entertainment services. For some, these may be customized and integrated into the home environment controls or it may be as simple as a boom box or a car stereo.

Audio and video components: Amplifiers, receivers, video splitters, speakers or headphones, control panels, chips, drives, etc.

Ideally, we just turn them on and enjoy.

When we speak about "players", we are really talking about an entire entertainment system.

The same is true on the web. The "player" is really just a single component of a larger system, but people often call the whole thing a "player" anyway.

Normally that is not an important distinction, but it is very important if you are considering building one.

So what is the bigger thing called? A "web entertainment system"?

The environment is not our car or home. It's web sites (and hence browsers on desktops or on phones).

For example, the "entertainment system" on Ourmedia consists of several components. First, there is the a thumbnail browser. This takes a RSS media feed and presents a series of thumbnails and metadata that a user can scroll through. Clicking on a thumbnail selects a media item to be "played" and possibly interacted with. This determines which player
component is displayed to play the media.

There are a number of ways that a typical media item can be played. For one thing, there are many players. There are also many formats. A "one player fits all" does not exist. Also, I am not aware of any open source Flash players that support more than the Flash "flv" video format. (I know this is obvious to some, but please be aware of the difference between Flash players (swf files) and Flash video (flv files). They are very different things. The latter is media, the former is a container used to show media)

Thus, saying "build a Flash player for Ourmedia" does not really make a lot of sense. A new Flash player will not allow us to view any more videos than we do now. In fact, use of a single Flash player would reduce the number of videos we could display significantly. Same for mp3's.

This illustrates the importance of considering the entire system and not just the player.

Part of the reason for the confusion here is due to the common usage of the word "player", but the bulk of the confusion comes from the lack of marketing requirements around the proposed player's features.

We need to consider what our users' "web entertainment system" needs are.