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Syrox designed and built a flexible asset
management and e-commerce system to enable Getty Images' sports
division to open a new retail channel to the consumer market, and
tie in with a number of high-profile sports affiliate partner
companies.
Benefits
The Allsport Gallery brought several key benefits to Getty Images:
- The Allsport Gallery opened a channel to a new market not otherwise
catered for by Getty Images services
- Existing content could be reused to extract higher ROI from
images
- The Allsport Gallery raised the profile and awareness of the
Allsport and Getty Images brands within a new market sector
- Affiliate partnerships with other websites and sporting organisations
brought financial, licensing and other business benefits
Features
- E-commerce system for the purchase of image prints and posters
- Multiple region and currency support
- Automatic categorisation and listing of images
- Flexible gallery creation, browsing and searching of images
- Near match searching for misspelt search keywords or related
images
- News, competition and image request sections
- Postcard facility for Liverpool FC affiliate, to allow fans
to send postcards to friends
- Handling of JPEG IPTC captions and tags
- Affiliate website partnerships, with automatic accounting and
statistics
- Range of affiliate rebranding options
- Affiliate specific images and galleries
- Lightweight intelligent client application for administration
- Full accounting and reporting options, including usage charts
and statistics
Background
Getty Images Inc. (www.gettyimages.com) is the largest resource
of digital images in the world, incorporating over 20 international
photo libraries including Tony Stone, Hulton, National Geographic
and Photodisc.
Allsport, a part of Getty Images, is one of the leading suppliers
of high-quality sports photography. Although Allsport's digital
picture archive is mainly aimed at the professional user, Allsport
wanted to develop a retail website for sports related prints and
posters targeted at the home consumer market.
Problem
As part of the Getty Images organisation, Allsport provide
media and professional users with sports photography through company
wide tools. However, these solutions are not suitable for consumers,
and are account based, rather than allowing microtransactions.
In 2001, Allsport decided to create a new service for consumers
offering high-quality prints and posters of sporting photography.
The Allsport Gallery (www.allsportgallery.co.uk) would be an easy
to use site offering selected images covering a wide range of popular
sporting events and personalities. Thanks to Allsport's existing
infrastructure for servicing the media industry, images of sporting
events could be posted to the Allsport Gallery very quickly, allowing
for example, football fans to buy photos of key matches on the
same day.
As a development partner of Allsport, Syrox had several challenges
to meet:
Rapid Application Development
A limited timeframe was available for development and deployment
of the solution, including all design, programming, content creation,
hosting and server provision.
E-commerce and Fulfilment
At its core, the Allsport Gallery needed a secure e-commerce
shopping cart system, and a reliable fulfilment and dispatch service.
The concerns of any potential e-commerce retailer were naturally
raised here; would users trust the website? Can we guarantee to
meet fulfilment and delivery deadlines? Can we handle peaks in
demand? How much administration will the site need?
Affiliate Repurposing
Affiliate partnerships were envisaged as an essential part of
the website from the outset. As part of overall strategy at Allsport,
to add business value, and to increase traffic onto the Allsport
Gallery, the underlying engine of the website would be made available
for repurposing and rebranding to fit with partners' websites.
This was particularly appropriate where a partner company already
had agreements with Allsport with respect to photography and distribution.
 Solution
Syrox designed a streamlined process to support end to end retailing
of high-quality images for the Allsport Gallery. The process catered
for the input, presentation, ordering and fulfilment of images.
The following is an overview of the process:
Image Uploading
- High-resolution photographic images are taken
by Allsport, retouched, cropped and processed
as required.
- The images are captioned using IPTC tags.
- The images are added to the Allsport Gallery
using the client application.
- The image information is read and stored in the
database. Once stored, the data may be queried
and results obtained very quickly, in order to allow users to
perform searches and to allow images to be grouped together.
- Images are associated with lists, galleries and/or
affiliates where required.
- Images may be organised by sports, categories,
lists, galleries and affiliates.
Website
- The website allows users to search and browse
images by various means.
- Users may also view special lists, such as the
Top 5 images for each sport, or galleries for specific
events, competitions or matches.
- The website has a number of domains associated
with it for different regions of the world. Also, users
may select a different region at any stage. The selected region
affects the display of the currency and prices of ordered
items.
Affiliates
- Affiliate websites present a customised look to the
Allsport Gallery, and allow affiliate galleries to be presented
- these galleries may not be available to other affiliates and
the Allsport Gallery, if required.
Ordering
- Users select images to be added to their lightbox
(shopping cart).
- The images, sizes and other options for the order
are chosen.
- Users who have ordered previously may log in; new
users may create a new account, including specifying a user
name and password and delivery address.
- The user is taken to the secure payment page at NetBanx
(the credit card transaction service).
- After paying successfully, the user is shown a confirmation
page. The user is also notified of the successful order by
email.
Fulfilment
- Once a day, Allsport sends details of new orders
to the fulfilment company using the client application.
- The fulfilment company prints the high resolution
images in each order and dispatches them.
- The Allsport Gallery undertakes to dispatch items
within 10 working days. In practice, orders are processed within
1 working day.
Image Management
In order to associate images with captions, categories, galleries
and other information, data is embedded within JPEG and TIFF image
files using the IPTC standard. This allows the images to be tagged
with important information throughout the process. The tags can
be retained during resizing and cropping operations. Allsport staff
and photographers typically add captioning information as IPTC
tags using tools like Adobe Photoshop, FotoStation or using functions
built into high-end digital cameras. The captioning information
is augmented with information that details the sport, team, event
and subject information, and the image is tagged with unique codes
to identify the image in the system.
The image is added to the Allsport Gallery using the client application.
Images may be added in bulk if required. The client is an easy-to-use
program that allows
staff to manage the Allsport Gallery including adding and editing
images and captions, assembling images into galleries and lists,
assigning images to affiliate partners, viewing order details,
and displaying and printing statistics on the website's usage.
A range of products may be configured with associated prices, and
each image may individually be assigned one or more products and
prices. This allows images to be sold in different forms, such
as posters, framed prints etc, and at different sizes.
Images are organised a number of ways:
- Separated into sports and categories. For example,
Cricket is divided into Bowlers, Batsmen and All-rounders.
Each category displays a list of the names of the sportspeople
in that category. Users may browse the sports and categories
to find images.
- Searchable by keyword. Users may enter keywords
which will be compared against the various caption fields
in images. Users may refine their keywords, and search within
specific sports or categories.
- Where there is no matching image for a set of
keywords, near matches can be shown. This works well if
a user misspells a sportsperson's name. For example, typing David
Beckhem will offer Beckham as an option.
- Images may also be placed into lists - a group of
images presented as a gallery. Lists are used to display the 'Top
5' images for each sport, to create a gallery for a specific event,
competition or match, for example '2003 Rugby World Cup Final'
or 'World Cup Final - Brazil 2-0 Germany'.
- Lists may also be used to create custom galleries
for affiliates. For example, the Open Championship golf
tournament affiliate (opengolf.allsportgallery.co.uk)
has collections of images for the 2003 Open Championship,
Champions, History etc. featuring images relating to the championship.
- Images may be allocated on an individual basis
to specific affiliates. In general, all images are available
to all affiliates. However, in some cases, an affiliate
partner will only require images relating to the sport the affiliate
represents. In the Open Championship example above, only
golfing images are available. Similarly, in order to adhere to
licensing agreements, the Liverpool FC affiliate site displays
images of Liverpool FC players in Liverpool strip that are not
available on the Allsport Gallery website.
Affiliates
 The Allsport Gallery was designed from the outset to support
multiple affiliate partners. The provision for affiliates consists
of several key elements:
- The Allsport Gallery allows for images to be
associated with specific affiliates.
- Lists of images can be configured for affiliate
galleries.
- Orders, statistics and other information are all
accounted separately for each affiliate. In particular, counts
of user visits, numbers and totals of orders and other information
is managed for each affiliate.
- A revenue share value allows a percentage of each
order made on an affiliate site to be accounted to the affiliate.
For example, a revenue share of 15% will allocate 15% of order
totals to the affiliate partner, and 85% to Allsport.
- Various options for presenting the affiliate website
are available, including simple branding to complete graphic
and layout redesign
The affiliate program has been an effective tool for the Allsport
Gallery. It has enabled valuable business links to be built with
affiliate partners that have not only increased traffic and revenue
to the Allsport Gallery, but have also opened up the possibilities
for licensing of imagery and other mutually beneficial arrangements.
To date, only 10% of the user visits to the Allsport Gallery have
corresponded to the main Allsport Gallery website; the other 90%
of visits have come from affiliate partner websites.
As affiliate partners' sites vary, and the requirements of the
partner range from simple links to the main Allsport Gallery,
through to fully branded extensions of the partner's site, the
Allsport Gallery needed to have a flexible approach to repurposing.
This was achieved by separating the presentation of the website
from the underlying code and database engine. This is a common
technique in effective web application design, but was taken a
stage further in the Allsport Gallery. Here, Syrox used several
techniques to reuse the main Allsport Gallery content wherever
possible. This allowed Allsport to offer various levels of rebranding
of affiliate sites:
Link to Allsport Gallery
In general, a new sub-domain is created for each affiliate, for
example, barbarianfc.allsportgallery.co.uk.
This will be the address in a button or link on the affiliate's
website. When a user clicks the link, the Allsport Gallery records
the affiliate information associated with the subdomain, so that
affiliate revenue share can be calculated for any resulting orders.
Otherwise, the site presents the same appearance for the affiliate
as the main Allsport Gallery site.
Branded Home Page
Here, the header of the home page of the affiliate site is branded
with the affiliate's logo. Often, the Allsport or Getty Images
Inc. logo is included. The content, wording, buttons and galleries
of the branded home page may be modified to fit with the affiliate
partner's requirements. Text reflecting the partnership between
Allsport and the affiliate is added to the home page, and custom
galleries are created for images specifically featuring the affiliate's
events, sports and competitions. Although the home page layout,
colours and logos are customised to the affiliate's requirements,
the rest of the affiliate pages are the same as the main Allsport
Gallery site.
 Stylesheet and Graphic Replacement
For affiliate sites where a more comprehensive rebranding is required,
the colours, formatting and graphics used on the affiliate site
may all or in part be replaced. This allows the underlying code
and page layout to remain the same, while the colour and format
of text and the graphics linked on the pages can be replaced.
For example, the Open Championship golf tournament has a website
(www.opengolf.com) which is predominately
white with highlight colours of beige and light blue. The main
Allsport Gallery colours are dark blue and white. In order to fit
in more closely with the look and feel of the Open Championship
website, the stylesheet and graphics of the affiliate site (opengolf.allsportgallery.co.uk)
were modified to correlate more closely. This allows the affiliate
site to appear to be an extension of the main Open Championship
site.
Full Redesign
In some cases, it is not enough to change the stylesheet and graphics
of an affiliate site in order to fit more closely with the affiliate's
main site. In these cases it is possible to change HTML templates
of the affiliate site in order to layout the pages differently.
The Liverpool FC website (www.liverpoolfc.tv)
has a distinctive look and feel which could not be easily represented
by the layout of the basic affiliate site options. Syrox designed
new templates which closely matched the Liverpool FC website, even
as the main website was still being designed. This allowed the
Liverpool FC website to be launched with links to the fully branded
affiliate site (liverpoolfc.allsportgallery.co.uk) in place.
Development
To take the project from concept through design to development
and finally to deployment as quickly as possible, Syrox selected
tried and tested portable technologies for the core
platform. The website was deployed on a high performance server using
the Linux operating system.
In order to offer maximum throughput and to handle many concurrent
requests, Syrox specified a fast multiprocessor server with a large
amount of memory and robust RAID storage. Frequent tape backups
were also configured for disaster recovery purposes.
For administration of the Allsport Gallery, a lightweight fat
client application was developed. The choice of a fat client over
thin client technologies brought several key advantages:
- Deployment fit well with Getty Images' IT provision
- Data is stored on the server and is retrieved using a high
speed ODBC connection
- The client application is a lightweight file of just 1.7
MB
- The client features high quality interactive reporting
and graphing
- The application can handle tasks like image reading, resizing
and cropping and FTP uploading
The selection of portable technologies proved to be a significant
choice, and one that had recent implications. Due to a change in
Getty Images Inc.'s IT infrastructure, it was necessary to move
the Allsport Gallery from the Linux operating system to a Windows
Server 2003 architecture, as a part of a process to consolidate
the management of IT resources. As Syrox had selected portable
components all with the availability of Windows versions, this
task was performed with a minimum of downtime.
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