KO Video - For the love of music

It’s designed to become The Stylish Place to find your favorite music, to read about your favorite artists and to share with others your musical idols and passions.

Short Presentation

Entertainment

KO Video is a premium entertainment tool for users around the world that offers song lyrics, music videos, artist pages (news, pictures, concerts, etc.) and artist fan clubs, all built around personalized user accounts that leverage web social media with cross-platform technologies enabling users to easily listen to, read about, watch and take with them their favorite music.

Music Non Stop

There are thousands of lyrics, videos and songs from which you can choose and create playlists based on your music preferences. The users can create and join fan clubs (groups), listen to other users’ playlists, keep track of the tops and communicate with others their musical preferences.

Finding What you’re looking for

KO Video is specifically designed to help the user find fast the music, artist or lyrics that he or she is looking for. You can browse through albums and tracks and select the music you like in a very straight-forward manner. Thus you’ll dedicate less time selecting and more time listening, watching or reading excellent content. You’ll never need to search from site to site in order to find your favorite music, you’ll find it here, constantly updated by the community.

Sharing the vibe

Users can upload lyrics, give notes to the albums or tracks and discuss with others about the latest hits. KO Video grants them points for every action they do on the site and will make recommendations to the users based on their site activity

Doing it with style

What really sets apart KO Video is the way it fulfills the task of being The Place for music, lyrics and video. It proposes a beautiful flash player that has 100% the functionality you’d expect from a high end music player, and that can play video too! It also offers a sleek and stylish layout that sets you in the mood for good music.

More to come

KO Video will provide even additional ways to enjoy music, through advanced use of playlists, charts and social groups, in order to help users find what’s hot and trendy. And most important, to decide what’s hot and trendy.

The solution and tech details

One of the important aspects of the website is that the content is loaded in the background through AJAX calls, allowing the user to play music and browse the content at the same time.
Because KOvideo.net is a high-traffic website that serves a lot of content, optimization is very important. We optimized both the back-end and front-end in order to provide a pleasant and responsive experience for its users. On the back-end part, we had to make sure that every query provides the fastest response and we also implemented caching with the help of Memcached for some parts of the website to reduce the load on the database and improve speed.
We used Sphinx as a standalone search engine, as it provides fast and relevant search results. As the front-end optimization is also very important, we used Javascript to inject highly repetitive fragments of markup, and the images along with other static assets are served by lightweight, high performance web servers.
There are 3 Flash files in kovideo.net :

1. The big player from VIDEOS page which can play: flv, mp4 and youtube videos;

2. A controller at the bottom of the page which displays info like: currently playing song, playlists, volume and all the necessary buttons to control the player. In the expanded state of the controller you can manage your playlists. It uses flash player 10 features for the flip effect;

3. On top-right of the second flash is the third one which is the video player itself. It can play flv, mp4 and youtube videos and receives commands from the controller. The reason this player is a separate file is because it can be expanded and if there was a single flash with transparency, the html content behind would not have been clickable.

All three flash files communicate with each other with javascript and the website can also communicate with the player through the same javascript.

The team

Credits for the technical and design work go to the teams lead by Alex (Creative Director), Ovidiu (Senior Web Developer) and Cristi (Senior Flash Developer). Maria and Dan skillfully managed the account, in what becomes one of the most innovative products of this year.
This marks stage one of many to come for KO Video, a chain reaction of surprising web efforts for a fantastic MB Dragan client.