ABC Media Player

Background

With an emphasis on simplicity, ABC needed an accessible way for customers to find, preview, purchase, manage and play back digital content on its websites, while ensuring that audiences were aware of the wide range of digital content available to them from ABC Commercial. Supporting digital rights management (DRM) was also a fundamental requirement.

ABC Commercial therefore engaged Hyro to conduct requirements scoping, design and development of a web-based and downloadable Media Player. 

The Solution

Hyro responded to the brief by collaborating with ABC Commercial and Microsoft, which had recently unveiled the rich media platform Silverlight, enabling rich interactive applications for the Web.

Built to leverage Microsoft’s .NET platform, Silverlight provides a powerful combination of programmability, rich media support and the ability to integrate tightly to business applications.

Within the media player online-savvy ABC viewers can:

• Preview rentable digital content available for download (“buy to rent”)
• Preview purchasable digital content available for download (“buy to own”)
• Preview physical items available for purchase (“shipped items”)
• Browse through recommendations
• Manage the Shopping cart
• Manage and play back downloaded digital content

Recent updates to the platform see added functionality such as the ability to rate online clips, send clips to a friend, comment, subscribe to a series, search within the player itself and also create playlists.

Success Achieved

• The Media Player, which delivers video, music and voice content from the ABC’s extensive library, represents Australia’s first major commercial project developed using ground-breaking Microsoft’s Silverlight rich media platform.
• The implementation features state-of-the-art capabilities combining media handling, digital rights management and commerce support.