Hello and welcome to www.digitalsurface.co.uk, the home of Digital Surface Ltd. We are a UK-based creative technology company offering consultancy and production services to digital media publishers across the UK, EU and beyond.

We make a business of imagining and realising innovative interactive experiences that ultimately contribute to the fulfillment of our clients’ business objectives. Our knowledge and experience of the digital landscape allow us to produce cost-effective solutions that leverage existing frameworks and best of breed services without re-inventing the wheel (sic) at every step.

We offer a comprehensive range of professional services that can not only enable but also add great value to your digital media project.

Our clients include

Adjust Your Set
Burberry
Five!
Hub TV
Jones AV
Lavish
Metro
OMS
NHS Choices
Thomson Reuters
Vidify
Videonet

Take a look around the website and if you think we can help you please do not hesitate to get in contact.

Although TG4 already had a strong multi-channel presence, back at the end of 2011, as part of an ongoing development strategy, they initiated a work cycle to further develop their online video offering, with particular focus on improving commercialization (eg through better ad capability) and HTML5 parity. To this end they chose to engage the Brightcove Video Cloud as their choice of online video platform. Deadlines were close and expectations high – cue the appointment of Digital Surface Ltd, engaged to provide a clutch of technical consultancy services in order to ensure smooth transition to and effective leverage of the Brightcove video platform.

Specifically, Digital Surface developed a solution design to match TG4’s functional and technical requirements and worked up a number of prototypes to demonstrate implementation approaches to key areas of the solution. A number of player customisation points were created, designed to ‘just work’ for Flash and HTML5 players alike. For example, video search logic and cue point management.

On-tap technical consultancy was also provided for the duration of the project which gave the TG4 web team greater confidence knowing that expert help and advice was only a call or email away during critical periods.

The video platform migration was a success and TG4 launched their new online offering to widespread positive feedback, you can see the latest version of their player here.

Cost-effective, requirements-driven technical consultancy in the area of online video and in particular the Brightcove platform, is one of the principle services that Digital Surface offers. Digital Surface has a proven track record in quickly understanding and responding to an individual publisher’s requirements. With a wealth of experience gained from involvement with a diverse range of online video projects, Digital Surface consistently brings contemporary and relevant knowledge to the table.

To coincide with the start of Global Entrepreneurship Week, on 14/11/11 Business Link, the UK government’s online resource for businesses, launched two major new online resources featuring video and e-learning content produced by Thomson Reuters, the world’s leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals.

Creative technology specialist, Digital Surface Ltd, is very pleased to have helped out on the video player customisation aspect of this project. Jamie Gledhill of Digital Surface Ltd worked closely with Thomson Reuters and their London-based video production agency, Hub TV, delivering technical consultancy and production services.

The new Business Link resources are ‘My New Business’ and the ‘Growth and Improvement Service’, both of which leverage the Brightcove online video platform (OVP) to deliver high quality video experiences across multiple platforms.

A number of the video titles featured are highly interactive, promoting user engagement through calls to action embedded within and alongside the actual video content. User interaction dovetails with specially devised treatments making for a transparent learning experience.

In one content format,’Right Way Wrong Way’, video playback stops at a given point and the user is offered three choices. Two of the choices are wrong and after being played out lead the user back to the original decision point, the correct choice plays into the next ‘scene’ and subsequent decision points. The wrong choices illustrate common pitfalls and thus the user learns from the experience of being wrong as well as being right.

Another interactive format features ‘Jump Out’ options where during the course of video playback, the user can choose to investigate a subject in more detail by switching to detail-level content. Once the detail video has completed, the user is returned to the main content at the point they left off and playback resumes.

An additional player optimised for accessibility provides important enhancements such as subtitling, transcript download and audio-only version. This player is marked up with screen reader-compatible descriptions for each of the buttons and can be completely controlled by keyboard.

All of the players are designed to match the Business Link brand and even the ‘standard’ player is a breeze to use, being simple and stylish.

One would expect the video playback mechanics required to power the various user experiences described above to be fairly complex and time-consuming to develop. Not so! Because the project is based on the feature-rich Brightcove OVP, project development time was kept to a minimum with custom logic being conveniently packaged into easy to update modules referenced by the Brightcove player at run time.

Being a long-standing Brightcove Solution Partner with a deep knowledge of the Brightcove Player API and system architecture, Digital Surface Ltd is expert at developing innovative interactive video experiences based on the Brightcove OVP quickly and efficiently.

Take a look for yourself at the results.

A ‘Jump Out’ example can be found here and a ‘Right Way Wrong Way’ example here.

For many online video publishers, if the budget exists to pay for a commercial publishing solution, then this is the obvious way to go. For others, particularly low-budget or start-up publishers, the benefits of a commercial service may not immediately justify the costs, especially if projected growth is likely to be slow or the publisher is not fully committed just yet.

Although all the major commercial providers of online video platforms have modest budget entry-level packages, some publishers may want to test the waters using the free services and content of the world’s 3rd most popular web destination – YouTube! Indeed, many top-tier publishers with top-level commercial solutions in place also maintain a YouTube presence in parallel specifically due its phenomenal popularity.

So how does it work? Given the global number 3 statistic, most of us are likely to be users of the YouTube service, be familiar with at least its basic workings and have some awareness of the various features that have been introduced (and withdrawn, in some cases) since it took the world wide web by storm in 2005.

Users, however, may not be familiar with the service from a publisher’s perspective. Here are the top-level pro’s and cons of using the service as a lay publisher (ie a non-YouTube partner).

On the positive side

• It’s free!
• Videos are by default counted in the powerful YouTube search facility.
• Content can be viewed across all major platforms using either Flash or HTML5.
• Flash players can easily be customised, HTML5 customisation is ‘probably coming soon’ at the time of writing.
• YouTube APIs can be exploited to present media listings/produce cool content discovery mechanisms.
• Content can be sourced from any YouTube publisher who marks their content publicly accessible (most do).
• In-player advertising only appears on video provided by approved YouTube content partners.
• YouTube channel pages can be customised radically using standard web styling tools.
• YouTube has built in analytics that cover the basics.

On the negative side

• The YouTube brand marker persists in the bottom right corner of every video and clicking on it will result in the user being taken to that video on YouTube.com, possibly providing an unwelcome exit point from your site.
• Targeting advertising against YouTube content can be inflexible and or expensive, it also requires that you become an accepted content partner.
• Syndication is hard to manage while maintaining publisher brand value at anything other than a pure content level.
• Because it’s a free service, there’s no service level agreement or support infrastructure and YouTube has every right to change implementation details at any time (in practice, they are unlikely to do so without fair warning as this would disrupt and alienate many users).

On balance

• If you are less concerned about advertising/syndication and perhaps want to leverage content provided by others, YouTube can be a good choice of publishing service which will free up budget for other uses.

Digital Surface provides You Tube player and channel customisation services, we can also connect players to reporting systems (such as Google Analytics) where player interaction and media playback data can be analysed in the wider context. If you’re unsure of where to begin, we provide cost effective system design and technical consultancy services. Contact us to find out more.

The Connected TV sessions at last week’s Future TV Advertising Forum proved to be of much interest. In presentations from key individuals from stakeholder organisations across the EU and beyond, followed by ensuing discussion, there was a palpable sense of excitement and anticipation of what lies ahead. For just around the corner lies the prospect of the connected TV experience becoming a ubiquitous reality as more and more households across the planet ‘tune in’ (forgive the anachronism) through net enabled TVs, set-top boxes and gaming devices.

In one forum session, Jordy Egging, Director of Business Development at Philips Net TV candidly revealed Philips predictions for percentages of households with net-enabled TVs (i.e. not other connected devices such as set-top boxes) in Europe rising to 51% in 2011 and 66% in 2012.

Back in September 2010, Philips joined fellow CE manufacturers Sharp and Loewe in announcing their intention to create a common platform for connected TVs across Europe and Russia.

Meanwhile Samsung had already paired with Yahoo! in 2009 to deliver connected TV content and since then has been joined by the likes of Sony and Toshiba.

While the opposing camps talk of openness, lowered barriers to entry and ease of distribution, in reality there are interoperability issues likely to dampen cross-platform deployment due to increased development costs at the heart of the emerging connected TV landscape.

Sounds a bit like the good old OS/browser wars between Microsoft and the rest of the world in days gone by! Or Apple vs Adobe more recently…ah the joys of global technology markets!

These battles are as much about content itself as they are about format and the ability to consume content. After all, what else truly differentiates opposing service providers and what else leads more than the first wave of techno-cognoscenti into the garden of connected TV delights?

Speaking of gardens – would you like a wall around yours or are you happy for the weeds to blend in at the edges? Figuratively speaking, the ‘walled garden’ refers to the ability of device manufacturers to limit choice of content consumed on their devices to a restricted sub-set likely to be legally and morally risk-adverse. In other words, the opposite from the internet, right? After all Sony et al wouldn’t want a connected TV Wiki Leaks app popping up, to take a current example!

So what does connected TV look like? Right now it doesn’t always look too revolutionary! Thanks to host device CPU restrictions (these are TVs, not computers right?) and real estate restrictions of placing interactive content along side video streams (generally limited to a third of the screen), there is certainly a degree of similarity between the core functionality demonstrated by Philips and Yahoo! at last week’s forum.

Interaction is also a problem as the standard remote control device just feels clunky when navigating / interacting with connected tv apps from the sofa, yet by the same token who wants to pull out their laptop or mouse while in ‘sit back mode’? Cue smart phones, hybrid hand-held devices and anything else that looks/feels comfortable and allows more dynamic control of a connected TV (probably through a pre-installed bespoke app). In fact, the pairing of handheld device with connected TV could solve another perennial problem – how can connected TV escort consumers to ultimate conversion at end of the sales funnel when true e-commerce may not be supported by the connected TV nor may the consumer wish to finalise purchases from their sofa, e.g. in front of the family? Answer – by seamlessly carrying purchase selections from one device to another for subsequent completion, the connected TV likely being at the beginning of the purchase funnel, not at the end. A series of user interactions that span more than one device and more than one mode of interaction…

So what’s the potential? In a word – huge. Albeit we may well end up with a dichotomy between the sanitised walled content gardens that the manufacturers want us stay inside – and that many less adventurous users will probably adhere to – vs the ‘wild west’ of unregulated web-like content (yee-ha!) that may or may not work, be true, be very entertaining or at the worst case contain viruses! Sounds like a scary prospect to stakeholders in the current TV market, possibly worth half a trillion US dollars world wide, who are more likely to see value taken anyway rather than added, at least in the short term!

There are certainly plenty of innovations taking place right now – YouTube recently launched both ad skipping and Leanback. PayPal is working on a connected TV payment system. Stakeholders are scrambling to align themselves and their respective propositions, although it’s entirely possible that a new über-corp will emerge to take the mantle…

One of the most exciting prospects for Digital Surface is the idea of truly integrated interactive connected TV content. So in other words, interactivity that extends, enhances and otherwise complements the streamed TV picture rather than simple ‘over the top’ apps that work independently and separately from the main viewing experience.

Watch out for prototype connected TV apps on the Digital Surface Labs page in Q1 of 2011.

Back in Q2 of 2010, Digital Surface provided production and consultancy services to Lavish Productions, the London-based leading Creative and Production agency responsible for conceiving and executing an online talent contest ‘Break Into Music’ on behalf of the careers and recruitment resource monster.co.uk.

The Break Into Music competition (now closed, but can be seen here) made use of the Brightcove online video platform to manage the upload, approval, review and rating of musical performance videos submitted by registered users via web or iPhone app upload.

Digital Surface was able to assist Lavish Productions in turning around the project in a lightening fast time frame and to budget by providing

• effective technical consultancy underpinning system design
• custom video player production at minimum cost

The technical consultancy aspect enabled Lavish Productions to ramp up straight into build by providing documented pointers to key resources, examples and suggestions how best to achieve the required functionality. An ad hoc support service was also provided for the duration of the build phase so that Lavish Productions could request additional input and advice as required.

The production aspect saw the delivery of a custom video player template using Brightcove’s XML-based user interface layout capability, BEML (Brightcove Experience Markup Language) supplemented by a BEML-compliant custom component written in Flash. The final player fulfilled a number of key requirements including

• customised sharing call to action
• voting functionality
• extended analytics capability
• configurable promotional image with click through

Illustrated documentation of the video player was provided, enabling Lavish Productions to easily make tweaks and updates to the BEML underpinning the player without prior experience of Brightcove.

The project was a resounding success with over 1000 talented submissions uploaded, stacks of views via both the Break Into Music website and shared links pushed to social network sites. Engagement was massive – over 28,000 votes were generated for the top 3 finalists alone. Above all, monster.co.uk boosted registration numbers with a huge group of talented individuals keen to make their mark!

Read more about services offered by Digital Surface.

Here we have a fairly straightforward web based mini-app showing how geo-coded videos can be visualised on a Google map and linked to a comments system. Deep linking is also catered for so we can distribute a URL and know that a particular video will be shown on the map straightaway when that URL is clicked. How does it all work?

The video publishing system is Brightcove and in this case each eligible video in the video CMS has an element of geo-valuable metadata associated with it such as ‘postcode=WC29PS’. As a further precaution against retrieving redundant data from the video CMS, each eligible video is also added to a given playlist (ie collection of videos). This way we don’t need to get all the videos from our video CMS in order to find the ones with postcodes.

At run time, our web mini-app uses the Brightcove Media API to read the contents of the given playlist and parse the metadata of its members to retrieve (UK in this instance) postcodes for each.

Next comes the geo-complexity – mapping data is based on longitude and latitude values, not on postcodes! So the next step is to use the Google AJAX search API to translate postcodes to mappable coordinate values. This process is not  100% accurate so beware if you want to place markers close together on a zoomed-in map where accuracy is crucial.

The Google Maps API makes it straightforward to take the returned positional data and create a set of markers on a map and determine the contents of each focus balloon when a given marker is selected. In the demo, elements of the metadata for each video are shown outside of the actual player eg video name and description. These are all added to a well-rounded snippet of HTML which forms the balloon contents.

Last but not least, the comment thread for each video is shown by associating the video id with that comment thread.

Did I miss something? Oh yes deep linking – the mini-app URL takes an optional parameter ‘id’, if present and the id value matches a video id on the map – the map automatically moves to that location and the caption balloon opens showing the relevant content.

So here it is – http://digitalsurface.co.uk/videomap/ and here it is with a video already loaded via the deep linking method discussed above – http://digitalsurface.co.uk/videomap/?id=42474432001.

Note that the Intense Debate comments element does not work with all browsers.

Here is a neat little video player that makes use of the YouTube Chromeless Player and YouTube AS3 Player API to present a YouTube video within a customised (and nicer looking, in one’s opinion!) viewing experience.

The player is currently hard wired to a single video for speed of presentation, a study of graffiti in dear old Brick Lane, London, by Piotr Obal, set to the music of Danny Griffin.

Although the YouTube Player API is somewhat primitive, all the essential bases are covered and there’s no reason why elegant, interactive media experience can’t be built using the YouTube player as a foundation. I’m sure you’ll agree that this player looks nothing like the standard YouTube viewing experience….

Digital Surface has recently added a new section to the website – ‘labs’ – the dark and mysterious cousin of the main page where dangerous and confusing experiments are published (sic), ideas and code given away for naught. To start, there are a couple of Brightcove demos that present and discuss new and interesting ways to exploit the standard video player idiom. There will be more material appearing over the coming months as suitable commentaries are created, source code cleaned up etc! Feel free to browse and add your comments and questions….

Digital Surface has recently worked with Five, one of the major channels in the UK, to produce a new generation of video player for its top-rated pre-school programming block, Milkshake!

The colourful video player, which UK-based users can see here, features a simple customised user interface that makes it easy for parents and young children to play episodes of some of the UK’s best loved children’s programmes including Roary the Racing Car, Make Way for Noddy and Peppa Pig.

The interface is based on the Brightcove online video platform and makes full use of the latest features of Brightcove 4 to deliver a unique and customised viewing experience.

Due to the heavy lifting performed by Brightcove’s XML-based user interface layout capability, BEML (Brightcove Experience Markup Language), Digital Surface can turn around production of highly customised media delivery interfaces, like the Milkshake! players, in a very short timeframe.

Taking the ‘BEML approach’, there is no need for intensive custom development and thus there are significant cost savings in terms of planning, development and maintenance.

Thanks to a deep understanding of the technical implications of building user interfaces using technologies such as BEML, Digital Surface was able to help Five enhance one of its key non-linear video properties and ensure the broadcaster was able roll it out on time and to budget.

Digital Surface provides online media delivery production and consultancy services to clients across the EU.