Heleot: a new video platform for sharing product experiences
Heleot Inc. is a startup based in New York that is building a community around micro video reviews on the latest tech and video game related products.
The platform accommodates a simple yet efficient concept of precisely structured mini blogs that inherited the very best features from Youtube, Twitch, Quora and Imgur.
Web
Vue.js, Python, Django, PostgreSQL
5 months
Project challenges
- To minimize and simplify user actions while adding new videos, we had to provide users with convenient tools allowing them to edit videos right on the platform.
- Large volumes of video content and potentially high user load in the future required a thorough work on the platform architecture and its database structure.
- As every platform providing high-quality content, we had to find a way to protect users from inappropriate videos.
- For the marketing reasons we had to make sure that the content will be easy to find on Google and other search engines.
Solutions
- We have created a custom video editor that generates a thumbnail storyboard for every uploaded video. This way the user can select the 30 seconds he wants to publish right on the platform.
- Our team decided to use Amazon S3 to store the content and Amazon Cloudfront to guarantee high access speed to the video reviews.
- Inappropriate videos are detected automatically. We integrated Heleot with Amazon Rekognition which analyzes all the uploaded videos, blocks suspicious content and sends notifications to the admin.
- To facilitate content indexing, the platform automatically generates a unique link and SEO attributes for every video.
Results
Watching poorly structured and convoluted video reviews in hope to find the exact product you actually need is a rather daunting experience. Heleot’s unique framework brings the perfect balance of entertaining yet informative content in a concise form, saving the trouble of going through hours of video reviews. It helps people to make educated consumer choices and connects people with the same interests.
Enkonix team played a key role in the development of Heleot’s responsive web platform that is comprised of a web app for video reviewers and an admin panel for the business owner.
Development of the project MVP took us 5 months and covered only the first phase of the product rollout. During MVP development we have focused on the functionality related to vlogging and social networking functionality. The project architecture and database were designed to be highly scalable and ready for functionality expansion, such as integrations with third-party services.