The demand for watching movie trailers over internet has been unprecedented; however the experience an average internet user has while watching trailers leaves a lot to ponder about.

Here is a typical experience user has when he wants to watch a trailer on using traditional methods.

No wonder why most trailer views are over using traditional methods are avoided or abandoned by users.

Trailer player is a combination of a lot of common sense and some mastery over technology. For a trailer player user the process is...

It has become industry news and this campaign has been short listed for the best viral "The Future of Marketing Awards" for Europe this year, for 4 possible awards. Best Interactive Viral, Best Stand-Alone Viral, Most Innovative Viral and Best Mobile Viral.

Trailer Technology: We have mastered the art of codecing videos into pure flash that play with a good reproduction of sound and video even on a dialup connection. So what the system does is opens up initial scripts that first detect the flash player (and install it if it isn't installed) then it uses a process to auto-detect the connection speed of the user, when done, it plays the start of trailer while continuing to download the rest as it plays. It provides the user various options including manually changing speed, screen size, pause / play, buy online and send trailer link to a friend, all in a compact and easy interface.

Resource optimization and affordability: The requirement of the system is that it should have the minimum possible overhead on the server. We stuck to some basics to achieve this. The whole system has been designed to maximize fetch and throw mechanism with almost no server side processing, except for the hit counting process. This simple technique has helped us to achieve results comparable to specialized multicasting video servers at 1/10th the costs in infrastructure and licensing. The system uses affordable Intel servers and open source LAMP technologies.

Trailer Management System : The system is supported by a strong back end that take away the pain of communicating with all parties involved, the media agency, movie publisher, the retailer and the end customer. The system has a control panel that provides requisite powers to each entity automating the whole process.

Media Agency: The Media Agency creates the trailer using the elements and assets provided by the publisher. And that is all; the system does everything else by itself.

The Distributor: Gets an alert when the trailer is online, this allows him to keep monitoring the details on the numbers of visitors, connection speed of the visitors, the referrals generated by viral effect, number of "buy now" clicks and how many visitors abandoned the trailer before viewing it completely.

Retailer: The system gives the retailer some remarkable capabilities that no other trailer system offers. The trailer gets published automatically on each of the retailer's site without any of them being required to make entries for each trailer in the product database or providing any form of API or server side coding. Just a few lines of static html code on the generic product page automatically fetches correct trailer when that particular product page is viewed. When a main product trailer is created, co-branded trailers for all selected retailers are automatically created and pushed on to their websites. Co-branded trailers mean that the trailers have the retailer logo on the trailer and at the end screen showing up retailer details. This trailer also has a direct link to the correct product page on his site. This ensures immediate conversion of clicks into sales.

End User: As discussed earlier, the only thing required from the end user is a click to watch the trailer, and most of the times, inciting enough to convert that casual click into a purchase decision.

Infrastructure Management: C&L provides the complete infrastructure and maintenance of the system that runs the trailer player systems. The nature of the traffic on the system is that most of the times the traffic is low, but it picks up, it explodes when a movie is launched or a viral catches up, at times up-to hundreds of concurrent trailer views. To or the systems uses 5 dual Xeon servers located in several data centers across the globe. The system has a set in mechanism to take over a failed server or share load across the servers if need arises. All this has been achieved without using any load balancing hardware or specialized routers. All this has been achieved using techniques we developed in-house supported by some simple hosted services.