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Video platform: a customizable, rich media solution | 10

date should be present. The video platform should have a rating system for the videos (thumbs up, thumbs down), and
a comment system
 People should be able to make an account and log in, created users should have a profile page where you can see the
users detailed information, what comments they have placed, what videos they have uploaded, and what playlists
they have created.

 The website should be optimized so that it would resize and show and work correctly on tablets and smartphones.
 There should be 3 ad placement spots, and an advertisement should be shown when the user pauses a video.

The point above was very important to Mahdi. Some clients would use the video platform for public use, and of course
every client and thus their company want to make some money and have revenues from the hosted video platform. The
ad placements would help in making sure that clients can serve their own advertisements to target their public audience.
It would make sure that that the specific client or company would have some earnings from the video platform, especially
when the hosted video platform has grown and gets the right amounts of visitors.

“Ad placement is a key point for every client and company! “
Quote by Mahdi Kazemi, company director.

Another but very important part of the video platform was the admin panel. This was only available to admins that would
login, and at the admin panel they would be able to control and maintain the whole website. However, the most
important function at the admin panel was:

 There should be a special page, that grabs random video files from a folder, and allows the admin to post a video
directly on the video platform with specific description, tags, categories and titles, and the admin could select the
starting thumbnail of the video. This page would also grab a random fake profile from the database and post it as that
user. On this same page the admin could, instead of instant posting the video, schedule the video to be posted at a
later time or even delete it from the folder.

This point may sound very strange, but it was the most important page of the admin panel. Mahdi and Andrej stressed
that this page should work perfectly. When clients host a public video platform for some specific subject, the website
would be empty at the beginning. There is nothing more unattractive to visitors than a website which seems dead and has
no users interacting with the website. Visitors are more likely to make an account and start being part of the website
when in their eyes, the website looks alive. For this a lot of content and users are needed in the beginning. This is a
strategy that a lot of websites use. Thus, having a special page where admins can post a lot of videos in a very short time
makes the website come alive.

3.2.2 My assignment and responsibilities

During my discussions with Mahdi and Andrej, they made it very clear it was my job to make sure the important points
above were being implemented in the video platform. Next to the functions mentioned above, I had to put effort into
examining YouTube and implementing the basic functions that every video website should have. I was told that I would
get some help from another intern doing design assignments at MAD Consultancy. This means that for the design and the
front end of the website I had to discuss parts with the designer intern, and it was necessary that he would take a part in
designing the front end. Everything else had to stand on my shoulders and was my responsibility to bear. I was solely
responsible to create not only a functioning and stable video platform, but I had to design the database tables in such a
way, so that information would be easily found and stored. It was my job to get familiar with bootstrap, FFMPEG and
Laravel, and implement the video platform according to their documentations.