ArtBabble: A High Quality, Cloud Based Video Platform for Art Content
Edward Bachta, Indianapolis Museum of Art, USA
Matt Gipson, Indianapolis Museum of Art, USA
Daniel Incandela, Indianapolis Museum of Art, USA
Charles Moad, Indianapolis Museum of Art, USA
Rob Stein, Indianapolis Museum of Art, USA
http://www.artbabble.org
ArtBabble.org is a new online video platform developed and produced by the Indianapolis Museum of Art to serve as a hub for art related video content online. Many distribution platforms for online video currently exist. However, the needs and responsibilities of cultural institutions are fairly particular and not necessarily inline with the current business models and incentives in place with respect to these options. Many of the building blocks composing these services have recently become componentized and available to web software developers.
Intended to specifically address several of the existing needs of arts institutions developing online video content, ArtBabble provides many features specifically tailored to the needs of a user demographic seeking online art content. One of these features is the ability for content creators to annotate video with a wide array of content access points called notes intended to provide users many “jumping-off” points to access more art related content. In addition, all video content on ArtBabble is time-coded and transcribed within the page allowing search engines to link directly to the desired content embedded deeply within a long video, this technique also allows hearing impaired audiences to experience this content as well. Recognizing the importance of scalability and performance to the user experience, ArtBabble is built to run completely in the Cloud, making use of the latest advances in this technology and extensive use of Amazon's Web Services infrastructure. This enables ArtBabble administrators to dynamically scale the server side storage, processing and bandwidth needed to provide the best experience to the user. As a visual arts institution, the visual quality of other online video services was sometimes found lacking. ArtBabble's video player is optimized to provide the highest quality experience possible given the constraints of client hardware and bandwidth.
In this demo, we will present the ArtBabble website and content. We will discuss some of the technical details and issues encountered in developing a large scale cloud-based software effort. We will demonstrate the content authoring procedures and what goes on under the hood. We will share statistics about ArtBabble’s initial deployment and usage.
Demonstration: Demonstrations 1 [Close Up]
Keywords: ArtBabble, Online Video, Cloud Computing, Art Video, YouTube
