By kerrizor on

Well, it took 2 and a half months, but we finally made it to launch with broadbandsports.com. Through the entire process I've been very pleased with the choice to use Drupal as our main development platform, and I hope to have a number of patches and module features (3rd party folksonomies, anyone?) passed to code owners in the next few months.

So who/what is it? Here's the press release:

(Seattle, WA) – BroadbandSports.com, the world’s first-ever, video-only sports portal.

BroadbandSports.com, the world’s first-ever, video-only sports portal, was launched today by the founder of Webby Award winning sports site, MountainZone.com

The destination sports website allows viewers to watch professional and user-generated sports videos and empowers them with ways to "tag", search, find, store and replay their favorite video any time, anywhere.

BroadbandSports.com addresses the developing shift in the relationships between producers and consumers and was launched to make sports video programming, traditionally under-served by TV and video rental markets, readily available. "We’re creating the world’s largest library of participatory sports programming and empowering users to participate in the creation and discovery of that content", notes Greg Prosl, founder of BroadbandSports.com

This opportunity also aims to address the "long tail" of participatory sports and the need to provide better access to both professional and user-generated video programming.

The service addresses the problem of finding and adequately "describing’ the contents and or "meaning" of video sports programming. BroadbandSports.com has developed proprietary "tagging" software that allows video producers and viewers to "tag" video. Videos are easy to find and navigate because they are "tagged" by users and producers who assign key words to describe the video.

Tagging also solves the technical problem of finding and describing the video. As more videos become available online, traditional search engines often fail to identify what the video "is about". "Third-party" tagging addresses this problem by allowing users to define a video’s content and meaning through tags. This approach solves "the inability for the Google and Yahoo’s of the world to accurately describe the contents of video". "Search engines do a great job with text and a lousy job with video" notes Prosl.

The site features a highly interactive community where enthusiasts are able to share, view and discuss their favorite sports and to rank and rate videos. Users can also receive instant notification of new programming based on "tags", similar to services like 43things, Technorati, Flickr and Del.icio.us

"Viewers gravitate towards BroadbandSports.com because it satisfies their specific interests better and breaks through the bottlenecks of broadcast television." As the costs of production and online distribution fall, smaller sports, like snowboarding and BMX, finally have an efficient means to reach their audience.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

yelvington’s picture

yelvington commented

Kerrizor, it looks great. Can you explain what you mean by "third-party taxonomies?"

I think everyone would appreciate a writeup on how you took advantage of the capabilities already in the platform, too.

kerrizor’s picture

kerrizor commented

Thanks!

IRT "3rd party taxonomies" really they're folksonomies/free-tagging, but I added functionality to allow any registered user of the site to add tags to any current node. Not the catchiest phrasing of the idea perhaps, but that's what we've been calling it around the office.

fbomb’s picture

fbomb commented

any way to get your patches to the video module?

radiofranky’s picture

radiofranky commented

if u get it..please share. tks

kerrizor’s picture

kerrizor commented

The first big thing I did was add upload.module and image.module support to video_form(). There's a couple threads in the video.module world that has links to the original posts on how to add image.module support, but mostly its just a matter of adding a line like
[code]
$output .= upload_form();
[/code]

I did a little hacking in upload.module (and image.module, for that matter..) but a couple hours of testing in the PHP and you should have a working version yourself; I'd be more specific but I've been working on this site full-time since mid-September, and honestly I have a hard time comprehending the diff :)

The other thing I did that a lot of you guys seem to want to know how to do is getting the video to play on the default node view. I cheated and stole the code that is displayed on the "play" view and dumped it into the default node view (right there on node.tpl.php..)