Xena Footnotes

Oxygen, 2002

Description:  This is a chat environment that allows fans to congregate around their favorite part of the Xena television show. This interface differes from movie SpaceTime Chat because the clip is broken down into segments which are depicted by the bars of the bar chart. The height of the bar maps to the number of comments for that segment. Comments are distributed synchnonously to other people logged on concurrently and also stored for future users. The software works for all types of streaming media. Special moderators can log on and edit chat. Chat is automatically censored for profanity. There is also a sniffer which detects the appropriate version of this clip to play for the user's connection speed.

There is a small content managment tool that allows producers to assign different parameters to each clip and to associate multiple URLs of video files optimized for different connection speeds with each clip.

I worked with Sharleen Smith, Yaron Ben-Zvi at Oxygen.

                  Technical Notes: I wrote the software in Macromedia Director/Lingo outputting to Shockwave.  This used a custom chat server written in Java with connections to a SQL database.