Making Movies Mobile
Last week Pathé, the largest cinema chain in The Netherlands, announced that they will be taking movies from the big screen to the home, by launching a Video On Demand Service. Today I’m proud to announce that Egeniq is their partner of choice to build the API that connects all the systems within the platform and that powers the VOD website, TV applications and all mobile devices. We’re also building the client libraries that allow the platform to be integrated in a range of technologies.
We are extremely excited about this project. It allows us to combine our passion for mobile technology with our experience in building highly scalable APIs optimized for a wide range of devices, and of course our passion for movies (even our job ads are heavily inspired by movies).
The combination of multiple technologies, a mix of client and server side programming, integration of a wide range of components and last but not least the impressive performance requirements all make this project a challenge for our team.
Breaking boundaries
But it’s not just the technical angle that makes this project so interesting; the project fits within a wider trend within the tech industry where applications break outside of their existing boundaries and are deployed on a wide range of devices. It allows us to think about the essence of a product (in this case movie watching) and then trying to find the best possible way to experience that product in a wide range of scenarios. Movies break away from the big screen in the cinema, and can be watched on anything from a big screen TV at home to the small screen of a smartphone while on the road.
Challenges
This presents some interesting challenges. Streaming the movie to a wide range of platforms is such a challenge, adequately dealt with by our friends at ParkPost. Handling payments, user management, providing features such as searching catalogues on different devices with different constraints are other problems. To deal with this complexity we practice what we call ‘outside in’ development; we start with the user experience that Pathé wants to offer their users. From there interaction designers (from Supersteil) devise the best possible way to provide that experience on a specific device. You can imagine that browsing and watching movies is different on a desktop than it is on a TV (using a remote control) or a phone (using a touch screen). Once we have the user experience outlined, we move further inwards to the technology required to bring the user experience to life; we connect the dots, hook up all the systems that make up the whole platform and make sure that the right data is provided to the right components at exactly the right moment. We often apply this ‘outside in’ way of working and our experience is that it leads to much better results than the more traditional approach of starting with the technology at the core.
In a couple of months, when the system is operational, I hope we can share a bit more on the details of how we’re building the system. For now, I’m just terribly excited that Pathé recognized our passion for platforms like this and granted us the opportunity to show off our skills!
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