Set-up of a Resource Share Platform for a Movie Delivery Company in the UK

The Client

This is a UK company dedicating to the innovation in the delivery of movies to home users.

The Situation

Bandwidth constraint in UK is now becoming an obstacle for home users to watch movies through VOD and people prefer to watch movies without going to cinema, hence our client is eager to provide a platform on which the movies are hosted and then streamed to users by charging the users and paying the contributors, at the same time, taking some commission fees from providers. There formerly existed a platform which was an online DVD rental platform; however, it went a long way towards what the client was trying to achieve due to the fast-developing market. The client hoped Abstract Technology to implement the project reusing the original codes.

The Solution

Because of the indistinct requirements, Abstract Technology spent nearly one month discussing with the client on the detailed requirements. The original codes were not ideal and the functions were limited, which couldn't meet the actual needs, therefore Abstract Technology decided to devise a new system from the scratch to save the time of reviewing the original codes. Depending on the abundant experience Abstract Technology accumulated from the projects ever done, we made some good recommendations for some modules like payment services, administrator module etc.

Abstract Technology firstly clarified the business logic. We divided the system into three parts which included front-end management, Content Management System (CMS) and stream video format's conversion. The front-end management mainly covered registration, personalization, search, upload, watching movies, payment service etc. The payment was realized through the gateway offered by payment provider. A billboard was provided to reveal some movies' popularity for users' reference. The CMS suggested by Abstract Technology was especially used for administrators to manage the interfaces and execute the modification to the front end utilizing the html editor, which avoided the directly handling files, thereby made the maintenance convenient. The process of streaming was really time and memory consuming, so a streaming media server was separated to implement conversion. This section would periodically check the new video files uploaded as well as copy those files to local server and furthermore implemented conversion.

Throughout the whole process, in order to guarantee the system's security and stability, the exception handling was emphasized, especially to those exceptions which caused system resources' leak. Moreover, our engineers tried their best to turn every module into independent user-defined control to greatly improved the codes' reusability and system's maintainability.

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