Sitecore Ooyala Suggested Videos and Custom Caching

You’re probably familiar with YouTube’s “Suggested Videos” feature; when you watch a video, you see a list of related videos going down the right side of the page. While building http://myyogaworks.com, a yoga video website, a similar requirement was made. The site leverages both Sitecore and Ooyala. Unfortunately, the Sitecore connector does not support any of Oooyala’s logic when it comes to suggesting similar videos. Based on the client’s criteria, I created a custom video suggestion list. A label taxonomy was established in the Ooyala backlot and all the videos in the library were tagged with the appropriate label. Once that was done, I was able to query the backlot for similar videos. In this case, it was required that all suggested videos have the same level of difficulty. Once that criteria was met, I was able to compare other fields such as benefit, teacher, and length. A list of videos was created and ranked in the order of most similar to the current video. While this seems pretty straight forward, my one word of warning would be to think about a custom server side cache. Each call to the Ooyala MediaManager (sending in the embedcode to get the associated labels) took around 1 second. This multiplied times the number of videos you are comparing and you can imagine how slow the page load becomes…