Inspiration
We realized that many people enjoy watching videos/shows/movies together and enjoy listening to music together. However, not everybody has the time/convenience to go and physically meet up with other people to hang out and watch a show. This inspired us to make a product that would make it more convenient for people to share music and videos.
What it does
Our web application allows users to synchronously listen to music and watch videos in real-time with their friends/family/colleagues. Users create rooms in which a group of people can all join and vote for the next video to play from a recommended list as well as nominate their own videos.
How we built it
We built the web application with MEAN, which includes AngularJS, NodeJS, ExpressJS and MongoDB. We also incorporated the Youtube API for access to media, Socket.io for real-time communication and we deployed our application with AWS and EC2.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into a big issue with copyright. Youtube does not allow 3rd party applications to freely stream restricted media content. This was a big problem because we weren't allowed to stream music from VEVO or WMG.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud to finish a fully functioning, deployed release of our web application on our custom domain.
What we learned
We learnt a lot about playing with APIs and the strengths/limitations of using APIs. We also learnt a lot about just how much work it takes to create a fully built web application.
What's next for beatbud
We would like to extend our media sourcing options so that we can allow users to submit music/songs from more sources. Soundcloud, Vimeo and file uploading are all media sources we want to incorporate in the future. Additionally, we want to implement more user permissions into each room by allowing room creators to assign room moderators, ban disrespectful users and change voting/nominating privileges. Perhaps in the future we might also be able to stream exclusive content much like Hulu, Netflix or Amazon Video.
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