Project Description

Rackfish delivered campaign hosting for a series of Skittles-campaigns during the autumn of 2010.

In one of these campaigns, live video was transmitted on Facebook to the fans of Skittles. David Phoenix taunted his fans and was enclosed in a glass box that was filled with Skittles. More Skittles were poured into the glass box as more fans clicked on the fan page. Everything was broadcast from a storefront location in central London.

Rackfish were involved early on in the project phase with technical support regarding video, streaming and hosting. This was done together with a couple of other agencies. Rackfish were entirely responsible for the streaming on load balanced web servers, encoding of the live video directly from the mixer table, CDN-services. Rackfish offered full technical support 24/7 with crew on site in London and a stand by crew in Uppsala. The vast experience Rackfish has in campaign hosting and video proved useful for the agencies when it came to all aspects of delivery. Technical solution Skittles campaigns were delivered on cloud based campaign servers from Rackfish with load balancing that enabled many simultaneous users and redundancy in case any of the servers would go down. Load balancing in itself opens the possibility to easily upgrade the delivery environment. In addition to this, other media was delivered by Rackfish through the service Sitestorage that is optimised to take the load off campaign servers when it comes to delivering static material such as pictures and other documents. The live video was delivered by Academy Film from several installed Sony cameras and was mixed. The video signal was delivered on SD interface to a Rackfish encoding server where it was converted and compressed to a Flash RTPM-stream and then ingested to CDN. For the CDN we chose to use a server in London with broad distribution in the US and Europe, but with a focal point on distribution servers in the UK.