Social Viewing

Inspiration

We were upset about the negative associations that comes with watching your favorite videos online. The main cause for the bad association is that it is antisocial because instead of hanging out with friends, viewers are alone often in a dark lit room for hours and hours until they finish that first season of their new favorite show.

What it is

We came up with a solution to this called social viewing. It enables friends to "watch together" and discuss the things they are watching. This encourages social interactions that do not disrupt the watching since viewers can comment on the video while they are watching. They can also send timed invitations to their friends to watch a particular video together--meaning at the same time but from different locations/devices. And since they can comment on the video in real time while they are both watching, a feeling of togetherness is formed. Viewers can also leave reviews for each video they watch that can only be read by their friends, so each viewer knows s/he can trust any reviews s/he reads because s/he knows it was written by someone s/he knows and trusts. Viewers can also make video recommendations for friends when they watch a video they think a certain friend would particularly enjoy.

How we built it

The way we came up with these ideas and the outline of the code needed to bring them to life is by sitting together and brainstorming. Then we divided ourselves up into smaller subgroups and assigned each one a different task. One worked on the PowerPoint presentation which displays all of our ideas nicely--with screenshots of how the user interface would look. A different worked on the U/I, while another worked on the pseudo code and yet another on the data flow and integration.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest part to figure out was how we will integrate the code for these features when the code for the video viewing was being provided by a third party called spark. Thankfully, after spending much time looking through their API, we were able to figure it out.