Sparkeo - Promoting and Monetizing Video through Drupal and Kaltura

Sparkeo is a new video course creation platform that launched its private beta at Le Web 09 (one of the world's largest Web conferences, that takes place each year in Paris) and generated buzz when it was recently featured on Techcrunch and other blogs.

Sparkeo is a video platform for knowledge entrepreneurs that enables them to create a business by creating, promoting and selling video courses leveraging their expertise. Sparkeo provides a complete toolset for the monetization and creation of interactive courses.

Sparkeo is not a destination Web site but a platform where users can create their courses and take them anywhere over the Web as a stand-alone video player. This will allow the content creators to be where their paying audience and students might be, such as blogs, Web sites or any social network. One of the most important features of this solution is the inclusion of a portable payment solution which enables the user to purchase directly from the player itself, anywhere it’s embedded.

One of the interesting things about the product that we created for Sparkeo is that through its evolution as a project we identified it as a perfect example of the benefits of building a platform under Drupal because it covers almost all of the sales pitches that we (at Linnovate) use with our potential customers.

"No Vendor Lock-in"

Sparkeo approached us after a shift in focus from building a generic social network using Drupal 5. They understood that they needed to focus on the content creators (who would embed their custom player) and that they needed some more power on the design side and with Drupal.

They have a talented development team and a great Drupal consultant that built the original site but could not scale his services to support the next level of complexity and requirements. In looking for Drupal talent, they found us.

By using Drupal and switching between consultants and shops that can communicate and cooperate with each other, Sparkeo saved a lot of time and money using an existing infrastructure to build upon and simplified our ability to dive in the project.

"Scalable Infrastructure"

The way the Sparkeo solution works is that once the video is uploaded to Kaltura, it gets converted to a streamable format.
From this point the blogger can market and monetize the uploaded video by marking it as a "commerical" video and assigning it a price.

Sparkeo helps tease the blogger crowd by showcasing the first 2 minutes of the video for free, then prompting to purchase it.

"Lego-like integration using reusable components"

The emphasis of Sparkeo's solution is not to become a destination site at first, but instead to give independent content creators a powerful platform to monetize the video content they create.

They could not do this while embedding the video from an external network like YouTube or Blip because they had to control (and brand) the user experience.

Sparkeo designed a beautiful Kaltura-powered player using Inkod-Hypera's UI services and built all kind of goodies into it which needed to be supported by services that we custom built on the Drupal side using the Services module.

These services consisted of -

• Authentication: Enabling you to log in and register through the player independently
• Comments
• Highlights
• Questions
• Rating
• Flagging of the content as inappropriate
• Displaying the biographies of content creators
• Displaying additional metadata about the videos

"E-commerce Integration"

A video marked as commercial will show the first minute for free and will then prompt the user to purchase the video.

This is where the fun stuff starts. The Flash video (which has already used multiple services to authenticate, display the videos, bios and more) gets a commerce link powered by the awesome cart link module.

The cart link is preconfigured (using the service) to route the purchaser to a pre-populated cart which contains the purchased video.

Once checking out, the transaction then gets processed through Ubercart's PayPal integration and a Drupal user is created for the purchaser based on his or her submitted email address.

The new user receives the usual welcome mails and purchase authorizations which are customized and themed based on Sparkeo's brand.

An important stage that happens once the video is purchased is the use of the Flag module to change the state of the movie purchased to grant the purchaser access to the now-available full course.

Once the purchaser reaches a customized thank you page, the content creator receives a credit of virtual currency and updates his "wallet."

The content creator can free the money earned once he arrives at a configurable threshold and (yet again) uses a flag to signal that he would like to withdraw his earned credit and receive a PayPal transfer from Sparkeo.

The whole process is orchestrated by Ubercart, Services, Userpoints, Flags and Views with Rules as a logical backend (alongside several modules we've developed for the glue code).

The dashboard is used to provide the first level of statistics for the content creator, providing him with statistical data regarding how his created content is performing. This is intended to evolve further into video-monetizing analytics as we integrate with Kaltura's statistical modules.

"You'll Love Drupal!"

The Sparkeo team has really grown to love Drupal. We have been able to piece together a very complex workflow using existing components, and they understand the value of the integration and reuse of existing elements.

Project Stages & Management

Managing a project that involves 4 companies and at least 10 clients, developers, designers, account managers, etc. is challenging.
To stitch all of this together these are the roles for this project and some of their responsibilities.

• UI & Design - (By Inkod Hypera)

An account manager, UI consultant, creative director and designers provided wireframes, worked with the Sparkeo team to approve the wireframes, then continued to create and approve the designs before delivering them in PSD format.

• Site building - (By Linnovate & Sparkeo )

An account manager, two teams of developers containing two module builders, two themers, and one resident PHP and Flex programmer, were in charge of exposing Web services from the site to Kaltura's team.

• Player Development - (By Kaltura)

An account manager and two Flex developers who worked closely with the Linnovate services team for all of the Flash interaction.

• QA and Customer Feedback (By Linnovate & Sparkeo)

A joint team which was in charge of defining the success criteria and usage scenarios, then judging the results in the QA process.

To manage all of the cross team communication, 933(!) issues where opened in our trusty Redmine-based project management system and 1260 commits were made in the Subversion repository.

Modules Used

The site is based on Acquia Drupal and has the following modules enabled

• Kaltura
• Views
• Rules
• Services
• UberCart
• Userpoints
• Cartlink
• Flag
• Nodequeque
• CCK
• Content Profile
• Addthis
• Gigya

Credits

• Inkod Hypera. Inkod is one of Israel's leading design studios and the company that is behind the design and UI of the Web site and video player. They have a great balance between usability, marketing, business and design skills and we love working with them.
• Kaltura. Although we've known the Kaltura team for quite a while, this project gave us a chance to work closely with their services division and together take their platform to new heights.
  Ninja Flash artists + a strong passion for Web technology = great fun.