Supriya PorwalNetflix has transformed the entertainment industry as it is one of the dotcom bubble’s biggest success stories. Much like other online start us in the late 90s such as Google and Amazon, Netflix has changed the way that the world received entertainment.
By disrupting the classic distribution chain that Hollywood once used to get content to consumers, Netflix has set the example for how people would come to know, utilize and digest their home media entertainment habits.
So how did Netflix up end Hollywood and its owned media distribution models?
How does Netflix work?
This happened by revolutionizing how modern world consumes content with out of the box thinking that was and still is ahead of its time. But exactly how do they fling videos to so many people at once, do they have one giant server fund that constantly pours episodes of House of Cards and Family Guy?
Not exactly, like many other large sites focused on media delivery, Netflix uses a content delivery network (CDN) to store and transmit movies.
Content Delivery Network:
You see, although Netflix’s entire library could seem to certainly fit on a few servers housed in a single building, there are some problems with this approach.
One, locations far from that facility would suffer from high latency which is not what you want for streaming videos. Secondly, this architecture would be basically the definition of a bottleneck, since a single connection that fast doesn’t exist and even if it did it would be really expensive. Thirdly, it would mean a single point of failure could cause Netflix’s entire service to go down if something happened at that one location.
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A CDN solves these problems by utilizing redundant servers in multiple locations to serve many geographic areas more quickly, to balance server load between them so they don’t get over worked and to ensure that there will be backups in case of an incident or outage.
But Netflix in particular takes this concept a bit further, as they know that they will have to ensure multiple presences at multiple regions they can also break up the content they offer and offer them region wise.
So, this foe the user means that they instead of connecting to some far away server can connect to a server near them and on top of this consume the content that is relevant to the region that they belong to.
This way content legality problems are also solved as the data center serving to each region will have content that is lawfully approved by the running authorities of that region.
How to create your own digital streaming app?
The video streaming market is really competitive, the experience of these time-testing video streaming apps like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and HBO show us that if we want to play in the big leagues your app has to have some distinguished features to offer. Let’s take a look at the kind of features and technology that can be used to make a winning app.
What do you want?
First of all, start by choosing the type of application you want to create. When it comes to video streaming services one can kind a lot of them online and start to observe the features they offer that are really different.
Thinking about the kind of video quality you want to make available and the amount of space that you need to cater to will help make an initial sketch about the features and complexity your app will have.
Video Library:
Simply put, you can create a server based video library and provide your customers with the access to it under your conditions like flat rates, free or partially free access.
Cloud Storage:
Now the need for this comes if the region or the video quality that you want to show is not allowed by your limited internet framework. By hiring the services of cloud storage you can make movies become available in different regions of the world giving you a wider audience and more engagement.
Backend:
To start of you have to take care of the data storage, where video content will be stored and hosted. You would need a backend server that supports streaming. For this one can consider using services like AWS.
Another option is to stream from already popular video streaming sites like Netflix and Amazon Prime catalogues using the SDK and API provided by them.
Actually, if you wish you can do without the third party streaming APIs and create an app based on a self-hosted server. In this case you will upload video content into readable directories in your server but don’t forget that you will have to deal with licensing.
Now let’s move on and discuss some of the features that are needed for a great video streaming app:
Registration and Authentication:
You can’t let anyone use your service without creating an account, however if you want to gain some profit by providing premium features or want to let uses create or download videos in their playlist, you have to think of registration and sign-in feature.
Discovery and Search:
Users are going to use your app not only to view their favorite TV shows but also to discover newer content. Moreover, you shouldn’t rule out communication, let users meet like-minded people through your app and they will stay there longer.
Social Sharing:
Enable social sharing to let users share videos or shows, this is also a golden opportunity for you to attract more users.
Online and Offline Access:
In case your users can’t go online that easily, offline mode lets them store a copy of the video in their library for later viewing. This feature is also useful if you want to minimize bandwidth usage.
Conclusion:
Mobile Game Development Company by offering mobile apps have changes people’s attitude towards video content and eventually this has all turned into the video consumer market where different types of apps are catering to different tastes in video content. Therefore, video streaming applications are mushrooming like anything in app stores around us.
Himanshu Patel
