Today, Belgian band Absynthe Minded is exclusively releasing the music video for Space, the first single from their new album As It Ever Was, to radio listeners all over Europe. The video won't be on TV, neither will it be available via YouTube or any other music site. Moreover, you will only be able to watch the video while Space is actually playing on the radio.

Rambla was asked to work together with a host of companies to realize this concept, devised by mortierbrigade together with Absynthe Minded. The song is given a digital watermark (technology by Intrasonics) which is detected by an iPhone app (developed by Momads) as soon as Space starts playing on one of the participating radio stations. As a result, the video becomes available on the mostexclusivevideoever.com (designed by mortierbrigade, developed by Wijs).

To make sure that the video can be started just in time, Rambla developed a dedicated web-service which allows the site to remotely launch the video stream on our CDN. After the clip has finished playing, a making-off video is relayed until one of the participating radio stations starts playing the song again.

In a previous post, we've already talked about the advantages of storing your metadata at the CDN level. With the upgrade of Rambla Web Services (RAWS) to version 3.30, this becomes a reality. Tags or metadata values can now be attached to your media files (and/or directories) using the Rambla Storage Service (RASS) or the corresponding web application. This allows you to do things like media aggregation, intelligent delivery of video ads, dynamic playlist generation, etc. But it may also come in handy for simple tasks like managing and searching your media, or linking different types of files together.

Our API's give you maximum freedom and flexibility in defining your own metadata models or structures. We've chosen not to restrict our users to a particular metadata standard or data dictionary. Instead, each user can choose whether to use simple tagging, or build a more complex set of interrelated vocabularies. You can choose to keep your metadata private or make it publicly accessible in different formats.

Moreover, the Rambla Monitoring Service (RAMS) allows you to analyze the end-user consumption of your media based on their metadata. This way, you can retrieve traffic statistics for all media files that are part of a given campaign, no matter where they are located on the CDN. Or you can compare the number of hits for certain types of video's.

If you're interested in using these features, we recommend that you first read the technical overview or follow our getting started guide. Also, keep an eye on our RAWS tutorial series, in which we will explain how to use the different metadata resources.

MULTIMEDIA AND METADATA

The field of metadata for multimedia is still evolving towards a common standard. Therefore, we have chosen not to implement metadata support as a 'finished product'. Instead, it is our intention to further integrate and implement metadata services, depending on both the market evolution and our customers' needs. That is why we have currently marked these new metadata resources as beta features.

For the same reason, we have not yet integrated metadata support into our control panel. Instead, we have extended the RASS API with a dedicated web application to allow users to manage their metadata manually. In the future, we may choose to further develop this web application or integrate metadata management into the control panel, depending on customer feedback.

So, if you have any questions, suggestions or feature requests, don't hesitate to let us know.

About Rambla Web Services

Rambla Web Services (RAWS) is the common denominator for a number of web services which expose a programmatic interface to the Rambla CDN and related services (hosting, encoding, statistics, live-streaming). The RAWS API's are based on REST principles and open standards (ATOM and Atom Publishing Protocol) and accommodate for rapid client application development in any programming language.