We always have cool, high-profile stuff happening at Highwinds, but can't always speak about it directly due to NDA until we get the blessing from our partners.

A few weeks back, we streamed the People's Choice Awards simultaneously with the event taking place on TV. It was really cool because our live streams showed you the behind-the-scenes views while the TV showed you the event, so if you had a laptop you could sit and watch the backstage happenings during both the event and the commercial breaks. I was monitoring the event via our StrikeTracker console to see the real-time analytics as it was taking place, so I got to see what was happening from a whole load of different angles. Our stream was also about 4 seconds faster than the TV, so you got a very small sneak preview of what was about to happen on set. I don't usually like awards shows, but the technology and event management they had in place for this one was really cool and made it worth watching for me.

Using StrikeTracker's real-time features, I was able to see a handful of connections from the teams at Highwinds and Incited Media around 4 PM while the backstage cameras were being set up and the streams were being tested. Later on, I watched the traffic pick up in real-time from about 8:20 PM all the way up to the event, and could see the stream analytics throughout the broadcast. It's very cool to see this sort of thing happening live, and then be able to go back to the hourly views and see the aggregate analytics information getting rolled up by the CDN with barely any latency. Our real-time data gets refreshed in StrikeTracker every fifteen seconds, and is able to show you what the CDN reported within 30-45 seconds of latency after each chunk of data is delivered. This is an unprecedented capability when compared to our competitors whose analytics data often lags behind by hours - sometimes hours after the event is over, let alone after each chunk of data is sent to the viewers as it is happening.

We're expecting a lot more of this sort of mixed-media event in the future, most notably for live events being distributed over the web in additional to traditional media. For our next-generation console, we put our "user" hats on and came up with a feature set that supports live event technicians in the field and marketing/executive analysts during each event. Our engineering teams are working hard on these features right now, with the goal of providing even more up-to-the-minute analytics data and command-and-control capabilities than we have today. I'd love to tell you more, but you'll just have to wait until we release the products officially sometime soon.

Our support of the People's Choice Awards is also currently the top story on contentinople.com.