While the open source versus proprietary software debate rages on, more and more companies today are finding their footing with open source components, even where mission critical applications are concerned.

Mypopkorn.com, a video portal catering to the Indian television audience, started out building the site on the .Net platform but switched to using open source components after proprietary software failed to meet their requirements.

Open-open open source v/s open-controlled open source

What were the guiding factors that made the Mypopkorn.com team switch to the open source platform? Ishwar Jha, director and CEO, Digital Media Convergence, says, "There are many proprietary software vendors, who will come and give you open source versions of their products, despite this, they still keep the control with themselves in terms of the DLLs or .exe files. On the other hand, if you look at open source programmers, there is no restriction on the usage their code. We were very sure that we wanted to use this open-open-open source and not open-controlled-open source". Thus, MyPopKorn.com decided to use the Zend framework, which is PHP based.

The process of video delivery at MyPopKorn.com involved two main considerations, viz. consumer-facing bandwidth constraints and the fact that the internet is a non-controlled environment. Thus, a lot of innovation and R&D were required to deliver data-heavy, rich media content in a highly optimised manner.

"When we were developing a large-scale database, which a project this size mandated, most people were skeptical about the ability of MySQL to handle heavy loads," explains Jha. The company utilised XML and SOAP to deliver messages in an efficient manner and to reduce the load on the database server. "The performance we achieved using these techniques rivals that of the best proprietary database servers," Jha adds.

MyPopKorn.com decided to utilise best-of-the-breed tools and methodology in addition to implementing the free e-sphere concept throughout the technology ecosystem. Thus, everything that they used is adopted from the free world, including activeCollab for project management in lieu of the ubiquitous Microsoft Project and Google Docs for creating collaborative documents and Mantis for debugging and application testing.

"We tried to find solutions that would be free, however, at the same time would deliver performance that could rival high quality proprietary software. All the software that we have used has exceeded our expectations," concludes Jha.

The PSIP principle

In order to make the website as interactive as possible, Mypopkorn.com followed the PSIP (Personalise, Socialise, Integrate and Participate) Principle.

With the youth being the primary target audience on the web, MyPopKorn realised early on that the one commodity this group is always short on is time. The Internet allows two-way connectivity and this audience demands rather than expects content that is extremely targeted. Thus, the first pillar of personalisation gains relevance.

The popularity of social networking sites like Orkut.com and Facebook.com is on the rise, and again the usage is high among youth vis-à-vis other segments. MyPopKorn.com wanted to see if it could entice entire families to tap into the same paradigm. Indian families are today often spread over two or more countries, which gives rise to potential for Web-based social interaction. "We wanted to see if we could get family members based in different geographical locations to watch the same entertainment programmes and then interact with each other on our site. This is how we incorporated the second pillar of socialisation," says Jha.

If Internet is the medium of reaching the target audience, one cannot forget the fact that people access the Internet from a variety of form factors in today’s scenario. Access points could range from laptops to PDAs to mobiles. Creating a delivery platform that is integrated and able to deliver seamless switching between these form factors, brought about the implementation of the third pillar i.e. integration.

With most Internet users seeking platforms to voice their opinions about available content, a built-in engine to add user comments and blogging features represents MyPopKorn’s attempts to add a participative element to their site.

Segregation aids scalability

In order to deliver rich media content to a global audience, Mypopkorn.com had to utilise high performance computing capabilities. In addition to this, they deployed a vertically and horizontally scalable IT setup, which was configured to provide high RoI.

In order to deliver rich media content, a website has to consider a four-layered framework. The first is the presentation layer, which presents the content to the consumer. The second is the application layer, where authentication and validation occur in addition to other myriad tasks. The database management layer comes in third, which involves storing of the content in the database to facilitate future re-use. This leads to the most important and last component in the framework, the media delivery layer. To facilitate seamless functioning, a high quality, high performance environment is required, which can handle millions of streams in an efficient manner.

"We consider these four functions as different buckets. This segregation allows the architecture to be horizontally and vertically scalable," says Jha.

Constraints and challenges

MyPopKorn.com had to overcome many challenges before it could finally function with an efficient content delivery platform. "Delivering high-quality video content despite bandwidth considerations was the most crucial challenge for us," shares Jha.

The next challenge revolved around the role of being an 'Internet producer'. This involved porting TV content to the Web in the shortest possible time. MyPopKorn.com managed to overcome this challenge successfully by keeping the time gap between a programme being aired on TV and snippets of the same being ported to the Web to less than an hour.

"As ours was a fully open source-based project, we wanted to engage best-of-the-breed professionals. So one of our challenges involved getting hold of the right people," says Jha.

With a comprehensive set-up as described above and a host of unique features designed to make you feel at home, Mypopkorn.com aims to ensure that avid television buffs never miss a thing.