Just a few days ago, Anna Yeaman of Style Campaign posted an update on their blog about DIS tech, or Dynamic Image Server tech. This technology displays dynamic (video) imagery on the fly in a user’s email client. After viewing the demo video (available below for watching) I was highly impressed, so I got in touch with Anna and requested some more information. Below the video are some questions and answers about this new technology.
How does it work?
The technology works based on time of day, location, device used and other variables. With these factors taken into account the images are generated on opening the message in real-time accordingly. The countdown to Xmas was a nice example: each day (of 5 days in total) the imagery in the received email was dynamically generated to include a new one. Take note that the receiver’s time zone is taken into account in this example. The streaming technology is DRM compliant. There is in-built copy protection, as the video content is never cached on the client device.
Is it difficult to use or make content for?
Using it is simple and content can be created in a normal fashion. The actual sending is not done by Style Campaign, just the dynamic imagery hosting part. After the content creation, the dynamic image urls are sent to the sender who can use them in their message(s).
Info for the tech geeks
DIS is a proprietary HTTP server. It’s written in C and built specifically to serve dynamically generated images quickly and efficiently. All drawing routines are written in highly optimized C code for maximum performance (100xPHP or 10xJava) minimizing concurrency when under load. With a relatively small memory footprint it allows for maximum scalability.
More info on the technology, with extra examples can be found on the Style Campaign website here. I’d like to thank Anna Yeaman for providing the info and the imagery!
