Hans Muller's Blog

July 2004 Archives

Desktop Java: Over Three BILLION Videos Served

Just in case you haven't been paying attention, I'd like to remind you about our purpose. The reason we toil at our keyboards creating the software that is the world wide web on the internet. The reason we march countless neuron armies towards certain slaughter at the hands of ephemeral monsters like XForms and javax.swing.text and CSS 2 revision 1. It's all about advertising. Your paycheck? Advertising.

Oh no you say, I'm paid to create some highly technical XML based modeling software that's used by developers to create web services for the remote administration of rack mounted blinking lights for doubly encrypted data center illumination. That's the parochial perspective. What you do is all part of an enormous interconnected technology ecosystem that's propelled by just a few sources of cash that come from the truly outside. One of them is advertising.

Advertising is why sometime later this summer several hundred very smart engineers at Google are going to be queuing up for large BMWs and personal wealth managers. Advertising is why content is king, advertising pays for the kingdom. What you may not realize is that Java applets are playing a vital role in delivering advertisers' messages directly to your visual cortex - with video.

I have to admit that until recently if I was asked about Java applets that targeted consumers (that is, everyone else), I would have brought up games or education or banking. At JavaOne I met David Breckling from EyeWonder and heard all about video banner ads. What's amazing about video banner ads is how widely used they are. Using a compact (only 68K!) applet player EyeWonder has delivered over three billion video "impressions" for all kinds of blue chip clients, including Sun, AOL, Intel, and Volkswagen. The sample videos on EyeWonder's showcase page all run for about 30 seconds. If that's typical we're talking about well over 170,000 years worth of video. Pretty terrifying.

So the next time a fellow developer asks you about consumer facing Java, or Java in web advertising, you can tell them not to worry. Java is already a part of their paycheck.

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