Personalized on-demand content

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Applies To: Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2

If you have a large amount of content on your Web site that you want to use, one of the best ways to drive traffic to your site is to support personalized user experiences. You can host content on your Web site that users can select to create their own customized radio playlists. Your Web site generates traffic when users return to the site to hear their playlists, which they also might want to share with their friends. You can also use your Web site to create playlists customized for an individual user based on his or her personal preferences, past behavior, or demographic information. In addition, by using demographic information, you can better target advertising to your users, making your Web site more attractive to Web advertisers.

When implementing this scenario, consider the following:

  • To provide a compelling user experience, obtain a variety of content and organize it into categories appropriate for personalization, such as genre, hobbies, local news, politics, and so on.

  • Use Active Server Pages (ASP pages) to gather the information needed to create a dynamic playlist for the user. As an additional feature, you can prompt users to specify whether the server should add new content automatically to their playlists or whether they prefer to add new content manually.

  • Use a relational database to store unique user information.

  • Use custom scripting to create a playlist that uses the information in the database and then store that playlist on a Windows Media server. For more information about custom scripting, see the Windows Media Services SDK.

  • Create an on-demand publishing point on your Windows Media server that references the URL of the user's playlist.