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Video platform: a customizable, rich media solution | 9

Chapter 3 – Assignment overview

3.1 Initial situation

The project “Video Platform” came into existence through an assignment of a client of MAD Consultancy. To say the least,
he was fed up with using YouTube for their sharing of videos within their company. It was too big, the client lost track of
the videos, and videos were lost because either YouTube banned it, or the uploader deleted it. There was no
categorization, as a consequence searching for a subject on YouTube the client would find all kinds of videos except the
kind he was looking for.

The client’s company actively tries to motivate its employees with educational videos, trainings and even to pass the time
and improving the environment of the company for the employees, they liked sharing funny videos with each other. MAD
Consultancy heard the client out, and through some discussions with the client and the 3 company directors themselves,
they decided it was a good idea to create a platform that would not only solve the client’s problems but the platform could
also be very attractive for other clients, or even within MAD Consultancy it was tempting to try it out within their own
company.

3.2 Assignment description

3.2.1 Assignment goals and company expectation

At MAD Consultancy the 3 company directors decided to not only solve the client’s problem but go further and build a
whole video platform that could be used not only for other clients but also for themselves. The video platform would work
as a home-grown product of MAD Consultancy, a product they could sell to other companies or publishers that would like
to have their own online video platform. So it was very important that the video platform is stable, and easy to use.

It needs to be a full video platform that could easily be published. With some minor tweaks (small things like coloring,
changes in links of the navigation bar etc.) a company should quickly be able to host their own version of the video
platform for any subject they would like.

The video platform should have a categorization system allowing the client to specify the categories, thus making the
hosted video platform very clear and more user-friendly. A similar tag system would make the website more optimized for
search engines, and videos could be found by their tags also, making sure users could always find the right videos very
quickly.

“Users should be able to find the right content in a fast way! “
Quote by Andrej Kalinin, company director, lead developer.
These were some of the points that were discussed and decided at the meeting with the company directors: Mahdi Kazemi
and Andrej Kalinin. During the meeting Mahdi stressed that it was important that research would be put into YouTube and
that the video platform should have a lot of the similar functions that YouTube had. Some of the most important functions
are:

 It should be clear to see on the video page how many views the video has, which category it was in, which tags it had,
the amount of comments for that video, the user’s name who posted the video, the video title, description and upload