Internship Project: St.Moritz TV
After being here in Los Angeles for about 7 months I think its time to show you some things I did during my internship. The first project I want to show you is St Moritz TV. (Yes, a Swiss Guy flies to California to build a site for a Swiss Ski-resort) :)
What is this project?
The website www.StMoritzTV.ch is a prototype for a video platform with short movies about St. Moritz and the Engadine. The main goal of the website is to inform tourists and locals about events, art, dinning and shopping in St Moritz and its surroundings.
What was the goal?
The current version is a proof of concept and developed by me during my internship at Almer/Blank. Its focus is to see what the needs of the users are and how we can build the final version and what we have to improve. Because this is a Prototype we are asking for any feedback about the site and would highly appreciate if as many of you can try it and give us a feedback. We want to see if there is a need for such a website and if so, how can we make it most enjoyable for its user.
But hey, let’s get geeky :)
What technology did I use?
Video player with Open Source Media Framework:
The player is build with an early beta (if we can even say beta) version of Adobes Open Source Media Framework. I had to add some functionality into the player as the version I used didn’t had all function I needed by the time I developed it. For example I had to build in a video time calculator and a function to read the source for the videos from the XML. Furthermore I had to implement a function to allow jumping to a requested video. For this I used external interface in actionscript to send data into the player from the html page. In this way i do not have to reload the website again if a new video should be played. Of course the play-list is continuously loading the next video as soon as the current video finished playing.
Next Up
The “NextUp” area is build with flash and reads the same XML as the video player. Every time a new video starts to play the video player calls a Javascript function in the html site. This Javascript function send the current played video into the NextUp flash file where I update the view class. If one of the nodes will be pressed in the “Nextup”, it calls a Javascript function too and sends the requested video to the video player.
HTML, CSS and Javascript
I created, based on the delivered design by Almer/Blank, the HTML and CSS part of the website. Different Javascript functions are responsible for handling the requested videos and advertisement .
Web hosting
The current version of StMoritzTV is hosted by Cubera Solutions GmbH. Hosting on a Swiss web hosting company helps us to keep ping time low and provides us with a reliable service.
Next steps
If this website should go in production we need to rebuild some parts. For example an easy usable back-end for uploading and converting new videos should be implemented. The player needs to be updated to the latest version of the OSMF (hopefully there will be a final release soon for the OSMF). Depends on the user feedback we will add a rating function for each video as well as a search possibility and even categories.
Happy testing :)
