Video Streaming Application for Cornell University

Client

VideoNote was intended to enable skilled educators to teach more people, more effectively, in less time, at a lower cost. The online learning platform allowed lecturers to create and upload videos for on-campus and off-campus students of Cornell University.

The application acquired notable success, which triggered the creation of a global cloud platform with an educational content database.

UPD: The service has since been discontinued.

Brief

VideoNote needed a team to support the rapid product development across multiple technology stacks. Smart IT was approached to extend the software development team and speed up the development process on the minimum viable product version of the platform.

Challenges and solutions

One of the top-priority problems that needed to be addressed was the time-consuming access to video storage.

• Video synchronization management solution
• Optimized video retrieval and video loading speeds

Because the e-learning platform would now include video lectures from several universities, it had to be scalable and provide sufficient space for uploaded content.

• Integrations with Docker, Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon RDS for smooth platform operation
• Automated code updates for scaling the system to a larger number of servers
• Unique storage space for university entities

What is more the platform had to allow students to comment and share the video material to make it easier for them to interact with the content.

• Introduced video sharing
• Developed video commenting features
• Introduced video time-stamps, bookmarks, and notes