Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing points to a session from O’Reilly’s ETCon (Emerging Tech Conference) today in which Disney talked about their internal and external adoption of RSS. Session abstract and Cory’s notes follow in the full body…

http://boingboing.net/2004_02_01_archive.html#107645285707116288

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.

http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2004/view/e_sess/4763

At the Walt Disney Company, we’ve seen aggressive adoption of RSS over a diverse set of applications, both internal and external. Internally, we use RSS as a common syndication format between our business units, including ABCNews, Disney, ESPN, and Movies.com. These RSS channels are then leveraged and aggregated across our Go.com portal and our internal corporate portal, and also syndicated to partners. In the case of ABCNews, RSS is being made available to the public under all content categories, from general news to Good Morning America.

Internally, we are also leveraging RSS as a means of collaboration and communication for our software engineering teams. All engineers maintain blogs and use NewsAggregators to track tasks, projects, and new technology. In addition, we are tracking changes on our Wiki via RSS.

Our most interesting use of RSS today is in its use as the backbone for the Motion content distribution network. This network uses idle bandwidth to serve large media assets across the Internet for ESPN, ABC, Movies.com, and others.

By standardizing on XML, and now more specifically, on RSS for content feeds, we have opened up new channels of communication both within our company and to our customers. This talk will discuss how we brought about change within our company, how it is enabling new products and services, and how we are still working to help our employees and business units think “standards” and “content syndication” when they are generating data.