Inspiration
Many quality Indy television shows fail before ever airing their pilot because the network television industry is difficult to penetrate. Advertisers and networks don't want to take a change on an unproven idea. Through CrowdedTV, Indy television show creators can build an audience for their show even before it airs, giving them audience demographics information to take to advertisers and networks to help prove their show can be successful.
What it does
We leverage social media accounts to collect demographic information on people interested in potential television shows. This allows networks to not only see which shows will be popular, but more specifically which groups of people are most interested in the show, making it easier to find advertisers and sponsors.
How I built it
The site was originally built upon WordPress with a crowdfunding plugin. I then built a custom API to handle the social integration and data aggregation and meshed it into the existing crowdfunding plugin. We are currently developing the social API further and are transitioning to Joomla! in order to move away from the crowdfunding plugin we originally built upon.
Challenges I ran into
The crowdfunding plugin we used is unstable. While it generally works, the developers did not understand how to develop for scale. This has caused regular site outages and numerous user issues. Additionally, each time the crowdfunding plugin is updated, some existing feature breaks causing issues for users. Moving away from the plugin will make things much easier.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
The construction of the social API and the way we are able to make connections between accounts to understand which are owned by the same users, all without the users having to login or create an account.
What I learned
This project has helped me learn a lot about building for scale, proper API security, and the importance of building from a good foundation.
What's next for CrowdedTV
We are transitioning to Joomla! and preparing to launch version 2 of our website which will be a complete overhaul. The new version will better handle scale, has better UX design, and will greatly improve our analytic capabilities.
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