Project 2: Floatplane Club
Hey, it’s been a while…
I’ve got an excuse though… I’ve been busy.
Yeah, that’s right, BUSY
You may be wondering, what kept him so busy for an entire month?
Or, you may be wondering nothing because I’m probably the only one who reads these posts…
I guess it’s just kinda cathartic to write every now and again.
Well, this post is gonna be a little short and sweet, a quick update on what I’ve been up to, the things I’ve been building and how I’ve been spending my time.
I figure if this is to be a kind of living portfolio of my work, it should keep living, cause I sure as hell am still working.
FLOATPLANE!!!
Okay, so I love the YouTube channel, LinusTechTips and have followed them for a long while. At the time of writing, they have around 3.3 Million subscribers on their main YouTube channel.
They post cool tech videos and all sorts of reviews for gadgets and gizmos, but what I really love about them is that they have the gall to post some incredibly creative and daring videos of cool projects and experiments they conduct.
Well, a while back, LTT decided to join the start of a brand new video platform called Vessel. Vessel was a magical land where creators could get higher revenue per view on their videos, and users could pay a small fee ($3/mo) to get videos a week early and without advertisements in them.
Vessel was born and all was good. Vessel sailed for nearly 2 full years, but everything changed when the fire nation attacked. They struck out with bolts of lightning and set fire to Vessel, sinking their ships with heaps of cash.
All said and done, Verizon managed to acquire Vessel (good on them by the way, that’s pretty frickin cool) and Vessel was shut down 5 days later, with no further warning to the creators.
This caused a bit of chaos in the world of the creators. Oh no! How do we keep these revenue streams coming in? they would cry.
Enter the Floatplane Club.
The Floatplane Club was a project founded by Linus of Linus Tech Tips to restore the services provided by Vessel in a completely new form for their own users.
The first incarnation of Floatplane was a simple in-forum signup with a monthly payment and a direct download of DRM free videos for valid users.
The promised future of Floatplane club was to bring back a service like Vessel was in its heyday, a beautiful streaming service with a variety of quality settings, great features, friendly communities, and early, ad free, releases.
Well, I just so happened to make it onto the team that would bring Floatplane to the masses in a few short weeks.
The timespan I’m talking about is around 3 weeks.
The crew consisted of 6: eric (me), catboiler, luke_lafreniere, chase, jake, and mortis.
The brunt of the MVP for Floatplane Streaming was carried by Catboiler and myself.
We poured enormous amounts of time into constructing a fully functioning buffered streaming platform consisting of an Origin cache, two Edge Nodes, and a Content Management System.
I was tasked with building most of the front-end implementation, then with the entire CMS and Transcoding drivers.
While I’d love to go into more detail about how the CMS works and how the Transcoding drivers function right now, I think it’d be best to hold my tongue until the system has proven itself and I’ve had a few hours of sleep.
Aaaaaanyhow, as it currently rests, the system is up and running. Members of the Floatplane Club on LinusTechTips.com are available to stream their glorious early-release, ad free content without too much trouble.
The future for the platform is so bright I’ve gotta wear my Gunnars…
We’ve come a long way in such a short time, and I just know we’re going a lot further soon. This is gonna be big and I’m glad to be along for the ride.
Thanks for reading.
- Eric