When the Microsoft Advertising team asked Springbox to evaluate the feasibility of a concept for a client’s new campaign, it sounded like an interesting challenge. T-Mobile wanted to steam
video from three concerts into four environments: Facebook, Xbox, Windows Live Messenger, and a mobile site. And they wanted to stream them in real time. We determined that live streaming was possible, if not particularly common, for the mobile site, Messenger, and Facebook, but at that time, not possible in Xbox. After consulting on the design of the experiences, we were tasked with building the Facebook tab, and other agency partners tackled Messenger and the mobile site. Xbox would get the same features, but with prerecorded video after the fact.
Working closely with Austin-based production company Giant Pictures, who had originated the concept for Microsoft, we identified the only two vendors at the time that were authorized to live stream video within the Facebook environment, and partnered with Ustream.tv to handle the streaming. We set about creating the Flash-based experience for T-Mobile’s new Facebook tab for the campaign, now dubbed Live Rising. We built out features like the band bios, video players, Facebook Events for each concert, and fan interaction features including commenting, Like and Share buttons all over the place, and entry forms to win a trip to watch the making of a video by one of the concert artists: Ellie Goulding, Cold War Kids, or Rye Rye. With the Ellie concert up first, we were ready to rock when the bottom dropped out from under us, two weeks from launch.
In February and March, a series of updates to Facebook dramatically altered how applications are embedded within Facebook Pages, specifically affecting Page Tabs like our new Live Rising one. Tabs moved from a top navigation structure within the Page to a left navigation structure, altering the size of the Tab’s content area. Around the same time, Facebook added support of secure-socket layers (SSL) to improve security, and changed the sharing features used in applications, deprecating the Share button. Big changes for our design, and a lot of rework for the Rich Media guys, but we stayed on schedule.
The bigger challenge was the iFrame problem. Up until that point, much of our Facebook work, at least for Tabs, had been done on Facebook’s own infrastructure, using FBML. We would build them in Facebook’s environment, and they would run off of Facebook’s servers. The new rules announced in February required all Facebook applications, including the kind of stuff we were building for Live Rising, to be run in an iFrame, meaning the application would be built on, and run from, an external hosting environment that we would have to setup and maintain. Now, we are not a hosting company, but we know some good ones. We started calling them.
We’d get one identified, and then the new SSL requirements would stop us. We’d find another good one, but the potential load from the concerts (and all those T-Mobile fans) would shift our approach to a cloud-based solution. We ended up with our friends at OpSource, a cloud hosting solution with great support. With all of the Facebook changes, we had to rework how the commenting and Like buttons worked, and helped Ustream tweak how the video players and streams worked. But a few hours before the Ellie Goulding show, we were all set to live stream the concert into Facebook. And it worked beautifully. We found out later that the Microsoft team happened to be at a conference with their T-Mobile clients, and they all watched it together.
Our team got invited to the second show, Cold War Kids, here in Austin. It was a lot of fun to watch the guys from Giant Pictures running around shooting the show, and watching the stream on our phones from the audience. The concerts continued to gain viewers, and T-Mobile added a fourth show, Robyn, to keep the success rolling.