Enjoy The Movie Party On Streaming Media
A web-based desktop app that can allow multiple users to watch 1 particular media through different streaming resources with synchronized timeline and communicate with each other via in-build instant voice/text chatting function.
At present, more people are willing to choose streaming media platforms to enjoy fascinating movies and programs at home.
For those frequent users of streaming media platforms, these following problems & painpoints are usually quite unavoidable👇
Current existing streaming media platforms are mostly designed for users to watch alone. However, the lack of discussions with friends while watching would somehow reduce the enjoyment
Even if the discussion is possible, the different streaming progress between users would also carry the risk of spoilers, which might also reduce the pleasure of watching
Very few users could use the streaming platform app or streaming device itself to discuss and chat with friends while watching. Switching between devices might also be frustrating sometimes
In order to figure out how those painpoints and problems we've mentioned in the beginning might affect on the experiences of streaming media users and who might be our primary user group, we did a brief research among some of the streaming platform users. Here are the results👇
Though the difference is not quite apparent, there are relatively more users who prefer to discuss with friends while watching programs on streaming media platforms.
For those users who are more willing to discuss with others while watching, spoiler is still something that most of them would like to avoid.
Most of the users would choose either the instant text messaging or instant chatroom as the method to discuss about the program while watching. There are also a few would recommend an integrated app like Scener.
In order to solve the problems that our team has found out at the beginning of the project and also answer to the needs of the users that they said and asked during the research and interview, our ideations and designs are mainly focusing on these aspects👇
In order to avoid possible spoilers as much as possible while watching, we designed a feature that could force the streaming progress to be synchronized perfectly. Once the playback begins, the streaming progress bar would turn into a pure read-only indicator and would not be available for adjustments. Also, every audience that is watching the streaming online throughout RemoteCinema app at the same time would have 1 chance and 1 chance only to pause the playback by him or herself. Once the pause button is pressed, everybody’s playback will be automatically paused for 5 minutes by default.
We've designed RemoteCinema app as a platform that integrates both text discussion and instant voice chatting features. In the display of text messages, we have combined the features of the typical barrage comments and made some appropriate changes according to the features and design ideas of RemoteCinema app itself.
In the design of the instant voice chatting feature, we used the idea of Walkie-Talkie which could avoid some of the disadvantages of pure open-mic. The voice chatting function can be activated by both the microphone icon on the playback interface and the speaker button on user's headset.
The Animoji avatars are designed to replace the functions of traditional profile pictures in RemoteCinema app. Those motional animated avatars can be customized by the users. By connecting to the front camera, they could record the user's expression during movie viewing in real time. With the help of this feature, the users could show their expressions to other audiences without exposing any of the real video footages.
The Reaction Cam is a specifically designed feature for those "climax scenes reaction" video editors. It is also the only place that might collect the real-time video footages of the users under their permission. Once allowed, this feature would use the front camera to record the real-time emotional reaction of the audiences during the designated climax scenes of a movie. In order to protect the privacy of the users, this feature could be manually turned off by simply unable the use of front camera.
We briefly summarized the workflow of RemoteCinema and built up a prototype at the end of the designing process. Here‘s the thing👇
📜VIEW PROTOTYPE📜As described at the beginning, this is a 1-week hackathon project, our designing team could only have less than 72 hours to complete the final UI designs. This means that our current design would still have a quite a bit of room for improvement.
Meanwhile, since the project is not yet practical at this moment, the concept of some design elements and some certain features may also appear a little ahead of the game.
