One of the more insane things that my team has done lately (we have a list and we track these things you know ) was the content production we did for Mix. 

While at Mix we conducted about fifty interviews with Microsoft partners, event attendees and product team folks.  For the first two and half days of the event Rory was doing non-stop interviews, Laura coordinated all the edits, Joshua drove the publishing process and Sampy ensured all was well on the homefront.

The idea for the content was to help bootstrap the new Mix site, get new stuff for Channels 9 and 10 and allow folks to follow the event along at home.  

To help do all this we streamed the day 1 and day 2 keynotes, published demos from the keynotes and conducted deeper dives with partners.   Through this we hope that those folks at home got in on some of the flavor of Mix and that Bloggers had good content to link to.  We tried to keep the interviews short with most being in the 5-15 minute range too.   Subscribe in via the Mix site, we’ll have even more content soon.

All of the interviews were edited from our hotel room at the Venetian and were published almost immediately after editing was complete.  Joshua Allen was the ringleader for publishing and did an amazing job at that .   My team has been covering events as part of our efforts in Evangelism all the way back to PDC’05.  Since then we have learnt a lot and actually have a pretty good system in place to ensure the content can go live while the event is going on.  Back at PDC’05 we filmed all of the interviews prior to the event, but now we’re really trying to do most of the content at the venue. 

One of the interesting things we’ve learnt is how to work around bandwidth limitations.  Even though bandwidth is improving at our events, our team can run short of it with all the file formats we produce.  If you look at a single video on our sites it requireds seven files for download versions and an additional one for our streaming service.

Downloads:  iPod,  MP3,  PSP,  WMA,  WMV,  WMV (High),  Zune

Man, that’s a lot of files to push up over an event network or from a hotel room.  To work around this we now have a server setup back in Redmond for compression and uploading.  From the venue we push a single file (2.5 MB/sec) back to that server and remote desktop in to that machine run compression remotely.  Via that remote desktop connection we do our publishing as well using the network back in Redmond for the heavy lifting.  At CES Larry published content from the coffee shop of the Mirage Hotel using his Cingular Blackjack phone.  It worked beautifully.

In addition to all the interviews my team did, Brian Keller worked feverishly to ensure that the recordings of the sessions were published quickly.  You can check out the Mix Sessions blog post by Mike Swanson that summarizes that effort.

One of the casualties of the event was our editing room.  We published a video at the end of the event that gives a detailed walk through of our facility.   Also for an extra special treat if you watch our montage video from the final day and wait until the very end (after the closing Mix animation) I have a brief cameo.

Thank you everyone who attended and helped create Mix.  It is definitely an exciting time to be at Microsoft.