PDR Group Ltd.

Challenge

We had two customers with a similar problem around taking videos and posting them to the website for others to view. The first was a company wanting to take out in the field videos and post these back for others to view, evaluate and respond before the client had left the location. The second was a wedding group who wanted videos taken and posted during the event. This would allow those that could not be there to see the event as it happened. Both had people with little understanding of differing video formats. Both had a wide device usage for both recording and viewing. Both did not like idea of using a third party such as You Tube to do the work with a preference for it to be a feature of their website.

Solution

As both sites were run on Sitefinity and hosted on Windows Azure, we decided to use the features of Windows Azure Media Services. We would upload videos to the site and then use a background process to post the videos to Azure Media services to encode and provide a standard output that could then be viewed on all devices. By using Azure we were also able to offload the streaming of videos to a specialist service rather than have the website deliver the content.
Enterprisefinity created the architecture for the Windows Azure Media Services integration that would satisfy the client’s requirements and allow for ultimate extensibility and maintainability. After two weeks, development was complete. The created module was correlating the video conversion workflow on Azure with Sitefinity’s content life cycle, making content publishing easy and efficient, while at the same time ensuring data integrity.

Benefits

With the solution the customers were able to provide a simple, recognizable three step user experience that everyone was able to understand and use. They were able to take a video with their device of choice, browse to the upload form, select their recorded video and post it to the site. As the module by Enterprisefinity was well engineered the company is now looking to extend the module to create different encoding types and cover posters from the same Azure media services Job. They are also looking to implement permission access to allow more sensitive recordings to be posted.

Personal Experiences

Working with Christian from Enterprisefinity was a great experience. After explaining my requirements he showed a great understanding of what we were looking for. He provided a summary, listing out what we had asked for both explicitly and assumed. He pointed out what was not included but could be considered. This gave us great confidence in our expectations. The final result met those expectations. The delivered code was easy to install and get going. Our initial questions were answered and the code was well organised allowing us to extend its features when we were ready.

Darrin Robertson – Owner, PDR Ltd.