Project Details
Travel Channel is a US cable channel owned by Scripps Networks Interactive that focuses on traveling in and around the US. Travel Channel hit the airwaves in February of 1987 and has over 95 million subscribers according to Nielsen.
We visited Travel Channel in Washington D.C. to plan for one of the coolest projects we have worked on. The project was an interactive player that streamed a feed from webcams on the set of the show Ghost Adventures, all live. Technically, there were a lot of things going on to get the feed from the camera crews, to the satellite feeds, to the internet cloud, out to hundreds of thousands of viewers, all in hopes of catching a spooky horror on camera. While Travel Channel focused on getting the feeds to the cloud, we focused on getting the feed to the viewers while giving them a little interactive fun.
There were up to four feeds that were simultaneously streamed to the viewers in a two-by-two layout in a sort of four pane window configuration. Users could click on one of four video feeds and get a closer look at that window if they thought they caught a glimpse of something. It’s a little difficult to describe, so check out the gallery to see how the final player came out. To compliment the live stream we built an interactive Flash map that gives you a cool overview of the asylum that Ghost Adventures was touring. We placed hotspots all over the map which had details, pictures, and links to the webcam on the night of the event.
There is a lot that goes into making a television show, and the coordinators at Travel Channel really know what they are doing to bring several parties together. We learned a lot on how to work with multiple companies on a complex project to make something really fantastic and unique.
