With 70 percent of Australia’s active Internet audience visiting each month, ninemsn is Australia’s leading online media site. With more than 50 news, sports, entertainment and fashion sites, ninemsn is known for its premium content and innovative user experiences. The company used Microsoft® Silverlight™ to create a new way for visitors to experience ninemsn on the Web. By using Silverlight, ninemsn displayed hundreds of high-resolution digital photos on the ninemsn Web site that Grazia Magazine took during Australia’s premier fashion event, Rosemount Australian Fashion Week. Web visitors can access the high-resolution photography without lengthy downloads. The Deep Zoom feature gives visitors much more control over the experience, flying over thumbnails or expanding any image they want. The enhanced experience leads to longer site visits, which is a key online-advertising metric.
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We looked at what Silverlight could offer ninemsn and saw many compelling ways it could add deeper, richer, more engaging experiences for our audience to further set us apart from our competitors. |
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Joe Pollard, CEO, ninemsn |
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Business Needs
With 70 percent of Australia’s active Internet audience visiting each month, ninemsn is the country’s leading Australian online media company. The site, which is a joint venture between Microsoft and PBL Media—operators of Australia’s popular Channel 9 Network, ACP Magazines, and Ticketek—features a collection of 50 news, entertainment, fashion, and sports sites.
ninemsn is renowned for its premium content offering and constantly looks at innovative ways in which to create rich, interactive experiences for its audience.
Solution
To create new ways for visitors to experience ninemsn on the Web, Chris Bright, Web Business Development Director at Microsoft, suggested that the company use the unique features of Microsoft® Silverlight™. Bright and his team put together a dramatically different way of displaying hundreds of high-resolution digital photos on ninemsn that Grazia Magazine took during Australia’s premier fashion event, Rosemount Australian Fashion Week. “The conventional approach to fashion photography on the Web would be a static slide show,” explains Bright. “You’d see an opening scene or maybe some thumbnails, but the only options you’d have would be to click ‘next’ or ‘back.’”
Continues Bright, “We turned that event into a fashion photo wall, where we put 700 pictures all on one page. Silverlight lets visitors choose their own journey through the photos. Visitors can zoom in on a single photo or ‘fly over’ the whole set of photos.” The photo wall includes additional information about each picture, letting visitors filter by designer. In the future, visitors will be able to filter by whatever information ninemsn wishes to include, such as by price range or other categories.
With Silverlight, visitors can copy a unique URL for every image and send an e-mail message of it to friends or even send them a link that records their entire journey. Visitors can choose the images that their friends recommended or make their own choices from the entire set of images. And, some of the images in the photo wall are linked to streaming video. Says Bright, “A visitor can zoom in on a particular image, click on a button, and watch as the static image is converted to a streaming video. For example, they can see a model walking down the catwalk.”
ninemsn’s designers and developers worked with Bright’s team and used Microsoft Visual Studio® 2008 and Microsoft Expression® Studio to create the photo wall. Because of the ubiquity of the Silverlight cross-platform plug-in, visitors can view the images on the wall using major browsers across Windows®, Macintosh, and Linux operating systems.
Benefits
The Grazia photo wall gives visitors to ninemsn an experience and a view of the event almost as good as being there. This further enhances the stickiness of the site, which is a key metric for online advertising.
Give Visitors a “Wow” Experience
ninemsn constantly strives to create the most compelling and interactive experience for its visitors. “With Silverlight, we can present many more choices to visitors and help them find something they’re interested in,” says Joe Pollard, CEO of ninemsn. “The ability to select their own content and send those choices to their friends or turn a still image into a video definitely gives that ‘wow’ factor.”
Web visitors can access high-resolution fashion photography without lengthy downloads. “The Deep Zoom feature of Silverlight means that ninemsn presents only a portion of the full image at different zoom settings,” says Bright. “When visitors zoom to the final, full-screen image, they get the benefit of that high-resolution image and a fast download because they’re only downloading the exact pieces of the image they need detail for.”
Track Visitor Preferences and Help Editors, Advertisers
Giving ninemsn’s visitors more control over the user interface helps keep them on the Web site, which is a critical online-advertising metric. Longer visits can translate to higher advertising revenue.
In addition, the richer, more interactive content has an added benefit of giving editors a more granular view of visitor preferences. Says Pollard, “For example, we can tell which designers are popular and use this information to help us guide our future editorial decisions.”
Create Better Content with Existing Staff
ninemsn’s development team had experience with the Microsoft .NET Framework, so they were able to carry over their skills to work with Silverlight. “We showed ninemsn’s staff how their skills working with the .NET Framework could be applied to creating richer experiences with Silverlight, saving them time and enabling them to innovate faster,” says Bright.
Additional Resources
For more information about ninemsn, visit http://ninemsn.com.au.
About Silverlight
Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET-based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web and mobile devices. Fully supported by Visual Studio and Expression Blend, Silverlight includes major media enhancements, out-of-browser support for Web applications on the desktop, smooth streaming capabilities, browser ubiquity, GPU acceleration, and support for 3D graphics and H.264 video.
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
