CASE STUDIES : Platform264 - Online Media Sharing Platform

Platform264 (demo site is www.stage264.com) is customizable media/social network and video sharing platform. It has all the functional features that help to publish and share video/media content. Platform264 team has spent several years on the online video/media market to finally come up with the next generation solution that fits the needs of the media companies interested in leveraging on online video market. Platform264 provides users with simple, highly secured, stable and HD quality media delivery application allowing setting up video sharing web sites in a matter of days. Platform264 administrators have full ability to manage and modify the application according to their needs. Among the main features available for the platform owners are: video management, categories management, user management, content management, server management and 100% changeable CSS user interface.

Challenge

There were a number of major challenges that we faced as we started work on the project:

Coding Standards: The platform was to be written using wide spread coding standard (ZEND framework) that reduces time for possible future add-ons, helps to install the platform on any environment, increases application performance and allows further maintenance by any developers familiar with the framework;

CSS design: The design should be created to fit the developed by our team CSS editor that gives an opportunity to change and modify platform front-end in no time and in accordance with company branding standards;

Flash player development: The flash player was supposed to go beyond flash files support and we needed to integrate H264 codec (high quality video) and develop innovative forward bitseeking technology for that codec. Besides the custom player should include number of “standard” features like full screen, dim lights, embed video, share feature and etc;

Admin area/CMS development: The platform was planned to be purchased and distributed by our client that’s why we needed to develop easy-to-use and quickly manageable Admin area/CMS that gives the owners/administrators an ability to modify the existing application in accordance with their preferences;

Solution

In less than six months, working in close cooperation with the client team (repeat entrepreneurs with prior industry success), we met all the requirements for this challenging project. We have created full CSS design that is easily modifiable with the help of our custom CSS editor, placed in admin area/CMS. Our development team has developed the whole application using one code standard (ZEND framework) and integrated it with the planned environment and server structure. All the features and functions were added to admin area/CMS and fully tested. As a result the owner of the website has total control of the platform and can add/edit/delete videos and users, add/edit/delete pages and the content, choose several types of user registration, manage advertising campaigns by just copy/paste Ad’s code to the developed banner management system, switch on/off the forum. The flash player created for the platform combines two major features of the global video/media network: H264 codec (high quality video) and forward bitseeking technology. The user could not just upload flv files but may have his/her videos converted in HD quality and in combination with forward bitseeking technology, any user may skip forward to any place of the video by just one mouse click. Besides these 2 features, our flash developers has added all necessary functionality to spread the video over the network (share, embed) and make it easy-to-use (volume bar, progress bar, dim lights, related videos).

Results

We have fulfilled 2 our main goals: make the platform easy-to-use for the users and easy-to-manage for the owners of the platform. The users have full opportunity to browse through numerous videos of the platform and using our flash player make the process of watching the videos very comfortable. The whole front-end structure of the platform is well planned and rather easy to understand and use. What concerns the owners of the platform, our custom admin area/CMS gave them all necessary possibilities to control, change, modify and “play” with the application.

Customer benefits

Cost Advantage. The system was developed fully offshore by the developers with deep industry expertise and total costs of the project are 4-5 times lower in comparison with traditional inhouse development;

Maintenance and Further Development. As the application was created using one code standard, new tasks and changes were deployed without stopping the application running;

Efficient technical support of the project;

New and Innovative technologies. The platform includes all the up-to-date and unique industry functionality combined in one distributable application.

Categories: Web Development, Media and Entertainment, Flash Server, PHP, PERL, Custom Applications, Media Streaming, Social Networking, Web 2.0