Architecture for a Video Facebook

Client: Richie Jones, Boeing <richard.jones16@boeing.com>

Kids love YouTube, but video is currently very one-dimensional - play, rewind, fast-forward. In contrast, the Facebook "timeline" is actually a multimedia narrative, weaving in conversations, status updates, links to friends and so on. Your task is to make a video alternative to Facebook, in which videos can be mixed with each other, and with text and drawings, allowing users to create their own narrative storyline - almost like a personalised video game (imagine a Mashup of Sims 3 and Little Big Planet 3). The architecture to support arbitrary non-linear combinations of different media will be a technical challenge. You could model it on the SuperCollider synthesis server for realtime networked music, but substituting (possibly low-res) video and graphics streams for audio data, and image blends or overlays for audio filters. Start with a locally-hosted version, and think about a cloud service version (probably with lots of local media caching) as an extension.