Social Media Platform Development for Digital Content Distribution

Fully functional built-in ecommerce and collaboration modules for secure content purchase
Integrated commenting, rating, and messaging capabilities
Improved platform performance thanks to the implemented load distribution algorithms

Expertise

Web & Enterprise Portals

Media Content Distribution

Verticals

Media & Entertainment

Iflexion delivered a scalable custom web solution that brings digital content sellers and buyers together on a single social media platform.

Duration

Months

Efforts

Person-months

Context
Solution
Development Process
Technologies
Results

Context

The Customer, a well-established IT consulting company, came up with an idea to release a specialized content management platform that would enable users to upload and sell their media files. The key idea was to create a centralized online market for digital content and virtual products, thus connecting content contributors and content buyers on a user-friendly hub.

The Customer wanted the system to generate content previews and support all commonly used media types including popular video, audio, and image formats. It was necessary to pay a special attention to the solution’s security aspects in order to ensure secure payments, prevent unauthorized distribution of copyrighted content, and guarantee that the platform is resistant to viruses and potential cyber attacks.

Solution

The platform represents a custom website for media content management. It allows users to create, collaborate on, and securely sell digital content, including video, music, documents, tutorials, and programs.

The system combines the features of a community portal with ecommerce software capabilities. Thus, the platform contains two core parts:

Ecommerce part provides such features as product management, user administration, secure payment processing, and advanced content management. The ecommerce part also hosts a built-in commission system.
Community part offers numerous commenting and content rating options and contains an engaging messaging system for online communication.

During the social media platform development, both parts were seamlessly integrated to provide a consistent user experience across the platform.

The solution is also equipped with a powerful search that enables users to find content relevant to their needs and tastes. Additionally, users can narrow down search results through a variety of filters, thus sorting the content out by topic, file types, release date, price and more. At the same time, content owners can use tags to make their content items easy to discover.

Once registered, every user gets a personal account page. Depending on their roles, sellers or buyers, users can access their accounts either to manage their content (add new items, delete outdated content, offer discounts, etc.) or to check up their purchase history, manage their connections and conversations. Users can

Development Process

The Customer took an active part in the social media software development both remotely and onsite. The Customer spent the first two months of the project at Iflexion’s office being part of the development team and participated actively in the solution’s architecture design. Having finalized the Customer’s functional requirements, development teams started to work remotely on the solution’s design and features.

Iflexion ensured that the platform is accessible via a wide range of browsers and guaranteed its compatibility with the W3C recommendations and actual web development standards.

During the final project stage, the Customer visited Iflexion once again to accept the ready solution. This allowed the teams to review the platform in details and bring in necessary changes immediately.

Technologies

During the social media software development, Iflexion created a distributed application that consists of a website, a set of ISAPI extensions (Internet Server API), a media encoder, and in-memory caching service.

Iflexion used Microsoft .NET Framework as the solution’s main technology, particularly ASP.NET supported with MySQL database and a database layer generator LLBLGen. The media encoder server was implemented through a fast multithreading approach, which made the final solution aligned with the hardware and software requirements.

To enable users to upload and download large files, Iflexion implemented the Flash technology, on the client side, and ISAPI extensions coupled with ASP.NET, on the server side.

Results

Iflexion’s .NET development team designed and implemented the requested solution that helps users all over the world to share and find media content to address a variety of individual and business needs. Once the solution was completed, the Customer turned to Iflexion’s team to get assistance in the website promotion and ongoing support. Satisfied with successful collaboration on the social media platform development, the Customer kept collaborating with Iflexion to maintain the created solution and extend its functionality.

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