Hooters

Hooters Goes from Flash to Silverlight

Hooters of America, Inc. is the Atlanta-based operator and franchiser of over 450 Hooters locations in 43 U.S. states and 26 countries. Of these locations, 122 are owned by the privately held corporation. The first Hooters opened October 4, 1983, in Clearwater, Florida, and has been a success ever since, with the company recently ranked 45th in Restaurants and Institutions magazine’s top 400 restaurant chain concepts in America based on 2008 sales. The casual beach-theme establishments feature “oldies” jukebox music, sports on television, and a menu that includes seafood, sandwiches, salads and spicy chicken wings. The company is currently approaching one billion dollars in revenue. Hooters is proud of the quality of their digital media content, which includes the following online properties:

• Hooters.com
• HootersMagazine.com
• HootersCalendar.com
• Hooters Swimsuit Pageant 2010

Hooters needed to completely eliminate Flash technology from their main web site in order to achieve an approximate order-of-magnitude increase in page load performance. In addition, there were goals to implement Live Smooth Streaming as a replacement for broadcasting pageant events, and to greatly enhance the user experience for browsing of online magazines for the HootersMagazine.com site through use of Silverlight and Deep Zoom.

The existing web sites were built with a combination of HTML, ASP.NET, and Flash, with SQL Server used on the back end. Although satisfied with their online content compared to that of their competitors, Hooters wanted to continue to improve the quality, and most of all the performance, of their online media. A principle area of improvement requested by franchise owners was to improve the page load time for end users. To this end, Hooters wanted to prototype new versions of their online web properties, migrating off of the slower Flash technology to Silverlight 4. In addition, Hooters wanted to prototype streaming of Silverlight video with a new Silverlight player, again in place of the existing Flash technology.

Microsoft and Hooters needed a local partner with top expertise in Silverlight, plus the project management skills to drive the effort with various subcontracting vendors that were involved in different portions of the project. In addition, in depth knowledge of Deep Zoom and Silverlight Smooth Streaming were required as well. Microsoft, already familiar with the Wintellect brand, came to Wintellect to take on the work. Wintellect’s expertise in all the required technology areas (for instance, our work on the implementation of Smooth Streaming for both the NBC Vancouver Olympics and the CBS March Madness major events), plus our deep PM and software process expertise, were the driving factors in our selection.

Flash replacement went forward as a straightforward effort of “rip and replace” of Flash elements with new Silverlight components. Both development and design skills were needed for this, and the end result was a significant improvement in page load performance. Video broadcasting was re-built from the ground up using Silverlight Live Smooth Streaming hosted by Origin Digital. For HootersCalendar.com, Wintellect decided to re-architect the entire user experience using Silverlight, along with the same framework from Bondi that was used to develop the Playboy Archive site for Playboy Enterprises. This allows users to interactively browse high resolution scans of the actual magazine pages, including searchable indexes, and allows magnification of the pages using Deep Zoom.

Page load performance (the highest priority goal) was increased by close to an order of magnitude, addressing the number one complaint of users and franchisees. Statistics from Akamai on the 2010 pageant broadcast showed a total bandwidth of 427GB, with a peak of 579 Mbits/sec during the height of the show. Pageant events were now able to be broadcast Iive, and with the scalability required to meet demand. Finally, a revamped user experience for HootersMagazine.com provided new marketing opportunities to leverage sales of Hooters Magazine.