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 web, 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 blend media into their own stories. 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 replacing audio data with (possibly low-res) video and graphics streams, and replacing audio filters with image blends or overlays. Start with a locally-hosted version, and think about a cloud service version (probably with lots of local media caching) as an extension.