Entertainment

KidVideos/KidMango

Customer
The customer is a company acting as a content publisher, and also producing own multimedia content especially for the kids. Company owns more than 100 titles – movies, cartoons, TV shows. Some of them were nominated and won the prizes such as EMI Award.

Challenge
Being one of the leaders in traditional content distribution, the company decided to shift the focus to the area of on-line promotion and distribution.

As the first step the company has chosen the on-line promotion through the internet. To make it possible the company prepared the following strategic action plan:

• to develop the pilot website (www.kidvideos.com) to start the traffic generation and attract the kids with the YouTube like service and position it as the “YouTube for Kids”;
• to develop the main website (www.kidmango.com), attract partners worldwide who would agree to show up their content there. As the USP here company shows it’s ability to generate the traffic – the pilot project works here as a good sample.

The main website positioned as global cinema, where everyone could watch the cartoons, videos, movies, popular TV shows, listen to the music or read comics. As the USP for the visitors the Community website model has been chosen with taking the specifics of the kids’ audience into account. The parents could supervise the behavior of the kids, and also the company monitors all the contents – videos, texts, comments, etc. according to the US law.

SolutionOnCleverSoft had the video streaming experience and proposed to start the development on the basis of its own video management product. This product was built by using open source components, such as RED5 Multimedia Server, mplayer, ffmpeg, and also the Flash Video Streaming as the universal cross-platform content streaming technology, with the ability of real time content processing and approval.

Website functionality:

• Guaranteed big video files upload from the client’s machine to the server, that also shows up the upload progress;
• Multimedia files conversion from almost any format to the FLV format;
• Approval workflow of the user-generated multimedia contents;
• Approval workflow of the other user-generated contents such as comments;
• Kids accounts management and parental control over the kids accounts.

System architecture of the main website was created taking into account the client’s requirements to the multimedia contents quality, different visitors’ bandwidth limitations and commercial contents safety.

In particular as the streaming platform we used the well known platforms from the leading streaming solution providers:

• Permission TV;
• Move Networks.

Also we used the www.kidvideos.com platform to integrate all the solutions mentioned above and Videos directory generated by www.kidvideos.com together with all the related items such as:

• User management (both websites sharing the same user base and parental control functionality);
• Contents approval (both the websites use the same comments approval workflow);
• Comments, ratings on the contents (both sites sharing the comments and ratings on the amateur videos), etc.

OnCleverSoft in cooperation with the client’s technical staff, representatives of the Permission TV and Move Networks, has implemented the multi-layer system to populate, store and stream the multimedia contents. Website uses three different media players – from Move Networks, Permission TV and proprietary OnCleverSoft player. All these players work together and transparently to website visitor.

Results
First version of the www.kidvideos.com had been released within the first 3 months, and next 3 months were dedicated to the user interface tuning according to users’ suggestions. Now the website is rapidly growing, and the number of users increases daily by about 50 new users.

Technologies & Tools
Web 2.0 design and development, Multimedia conversion and streaming;
PHP/MySQL, Ajax, Flash ActionScript 2.0, RED5 Multimedia Server;
Development process – Agile-like iterative process