Here're my running notes from Leveraging RSS at Disney: from Collaboration to Massive Content Delivery at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.
Modern computers can handle large files, video, media, etc.
Want to provide experiences above the effective bitrate of our users, and bits are expensive to ship.
Example: Added a high-quality video clip to the front page of ESPN.com.
Came to think about the enclosure tag in RSS — the idea of asynchronously d/ling content behind the scenes. You can download the experience prior to hitting the page.
Built a client-side technology — espn.com, disney.com, etc — an RSS aggregator that d/ls and pre-caches video on the machine, and communicates with the mothership to tell them who's got what in the cache.
We wanted 500k users in 1 year — in three weeks we hit a million. Over 2 million now. Sustainign 2GB of bandwidth, TBs/day.
