Member Showcase: Metia
Project: MSN makes the Royal Wedding personal with interactive historical timeline
Client: MSN
Outline Brief
As a leading news service it was no surprise that MSN planned in-depth and immersive coverage to reflect the UK’s nationwide celebration of the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton. But MSN wanted to go further, it hoped to use the occasion as a showcase for its ability to innovate through the convergence of its own services and social media, to create exciting news platforms for viewers and advertisers alike.
The wedding was the ideal global showcase to highlight this sort of innovation. MSN turned to leading digital agency Metia to help it create the platform.
Metia recommended the use of HTML5 to build a rich experience that could be accessed through any HTML5 enabled browser. HTML5 is an emerging web standard that offers media companies and brands the opportunity to build immersive experiences that can be viewed through a new generation of web browsers without the need for plug-ins or downloads.
MSN’s parent company, Microsoft, had itself recently launched a new version of its own market leading Internet Explorer browser featuring extensive support for HTML5 standards. Metia’s proposed solution would highlight the strengths of the new version of Internet Explorer but still be accessible through competitors’ browsers.
While HTML5 opened up new possibilities it was critical that the content experience was useful, interesting and engaging in its own right, and the site was not simply a case of ‘technology for technology’s sake’. The two key objectives of the project were to drive time and engagement on MSN, and also encourage downloads of Internet Explorer.
Outline Work
Metia used HTML5 to create an interactive Royal Wedding timeline which detailed key dates in the royal couple’s lives, and juxtaposed other events that happened in that month and year. The Royal Wedding timeline allowed users to explore what was happening in the world on key dates in the lives of William and Kate, find out about contemporary news, and listen to the musical hits of the time. Music previews were streamed by HMV, users could then link to HMV’s own site to purchase their favourite tracks.
In addition, Metia also developed an MSN Royal Wedding Video Player, which delivered a feed of ITV’s live streaming video of the Royal Wedding. It also enabled real time conversations about the event through integration with social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook.
Matthew Ball, Editor-in-Chief at MSN UK, explained: “With a public holiday and plans for local street parties, there was no doubt the nation was getting very excited about the Royal Wedding. When Charles and Diana got married, the whole country celebrated. We wanted to help recreate that sense of inclusion and occasion by making it easy to find out what else was happening when William and Kate got engaged, for example, or what the top five hits were when William was born.”
“Music is incredibly evocative and memorable. Integrating music into our Royal Wedding timeline connected users with what was happening in their own lives when Royal landmarks took place. You might not remember the month Kate or William was born, but you’re more likely to remember ‘Don’t You Want Me’ by the Human League and ‘Make Believe’ by Bucks Fizz - both top hits at that time - weaving personal memories to these and other Royal events.”
By watching coverage of the event using MSN’s Royal Wedding Video Player, users were able to share their thoughts and experiences with friends and family, without having to leave the page. The MSN Royal Wedding Viewer featured a stream of ITV video coverage and MSN news commentary, integrated with Twitter and Facebook. Using Microsoft Fuse Labs’ Bing Twitter Map, users could view geo-located tweets across the world, or zoom in to see tweets from the crowd lining the route of the procession.
Unique Features
Alastair Bruce, Senior Product Manager at MSN UK added: “From start to finish this was a professionally run project and we were always been confident that MSN would end up with a product it was proud to show off. We gathered lots of positive feedback internally and among our advertising partners. The public clearly liked it as well judging by the good level of engagement within the site.”
To build the site Metia drew upon its extensive experience in HTML5 development projects. The development team made good use of HTML5’s canvas tags element, which provides an API for pixel rendering, and therefore a flexible way to draw and animate shapes. This enabled the site to feature a high degree of visual complexity while retaining excellent performance, especially when viewed using Internet Explorer due its superior software and hardware acceleration (most other browsers rely on software only). The new version of Internet Explorer also supported native audio, without the need for external plug-ins, providing a seamless audio-visual experience.
“Using the latest web standards and new technologies was essential to deliver the great wedding experience we had envisioned. With the timeline we used HTML5’s canvas and audio tags to serve up rich content in an intuitive fashion. With the MSN Royal Wedding Video Player we added another, far more social dimension, compared to the experience of watching the wedding on TV,” added Steve Ellis, Chief Exec
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