Codevio deliver C-It-Now application to Honda Holdcroft.

Situation
Our client, a technology provider to Honda, required a solution that would allow a car sales person to remotely present a car to a prospective buyer over the Internet, using live video.

Solution
Codevio worked with our client to put together an end to end solution:

• Camera selection - Codevio reviewed a number of cameras, ranging from basic handycams to professional quality head mounted 'bullet' cameras. The final selection was a good quality handycam, allowing the operator to use the video screen to help with framing, and also to zoom in to view finer details.
• Netbook, hardware video encoder - Codevio reviewed the options available to encode the video before streaming it onto the network. Various options were considered, from software encoding using a high end laptop to analog video senders. The final solution used a small Asus netbook, paired with a FastVDO h.264 video encoder.
• Video Streamer - Codevio implemented a small video streaming application that was capable of initialising the FastVDO device, before streaming the video out as an RTSP stream.
• Wowza server back end - Wowza was chosen as the streaming server, and a custom plug-in was developed.
• Flash front end - the final part of the solution was to produce a Flash based application in Flex to act as the interface between the presenter and the prospective buyer. This ensured that no downloads would be necessary to view the video, and also offered cross browser compatibility. The application initially presents a holding page while the system initiates, and once connected, the live video stream is presented alongside more detailed information about the car being viewed.

The finished solution, now known as C-It-Now, has been installed in a number of car dealerships, including the Honda dealership in Holdcroft. A demonstration of the system can be seen in the following video: