Empowering Cultural Expression

KAVEA stands as a beacon of cultural enrichment, offering a free streaming video platform dedicated to showcasing swiss video productions that entertain, educate, and inspire. Rooted in the belief that culture has the power to transform lives, KAVEA provides a space where stories can be shared, ideas can flourish, and creativity knows no bounds.

At Cruncher, we had the privilege of partnering with KAVEA to bring their vision to life through the development of their streaming platform. From the outset, we recognized the unique challenges posed by such a venture – the need for scalability, reliability, and seamless user experience.

One of the primary challenges lay in handling the sheer volume of content that KAVEA aimed to deliver. With a diverse array of videos, documentaries, music, podcasts, and gaming content, the platform needed to support high-quality streaming while ensuring optimal performance across devices.

Cavea, (lat): seating sections of Greek and Roman theatres and amphitheatres.

From video uploads to content categorization, user authentication to seamless streaming, every aspect of the platform was meticulously crafted to provide a rich user experience for both creators and viewers.

The technology behind a video streaming platform

Cruncher tackled the challenge of efficient web streaming by building a custom video transcoding pipeline that will handle uploads of arbitrary size videos (think hours-long 8k uncompressed productions) directly onto S3 buckets, programmatically spin up powerful cloud-based transcoding servers that will download and transcode the videos into adaptative bitrate streams (HTTP Live Streaming / HLS) and upload these back onto S3 for efficient hosting and streaming.

On the front-end we developed and customized a bespoke video player component based on custom elements, which renders HLS adaptative bitrate video streams natively or via HLS.js to devices that don't yet implement HTTP Live Streaming.

KAVEA is a free to use streaming platform, but they are subscription-based and accept donations to support the creators uploading and hosting content to their platform. To accept payments and handle renewabel subscriptions, we implemented a custom subscription system based on the Payrexx PSP.