I wanted to know if a concept like this below was possible:
We are a non-profit who will have selling a movie we made online shortly.
We would like to make a donation page where if a person donates $100, they will be given five special access codes that can then be sent to their friends e-mails. Their friends will then input the special access code on a website in order to watch the streaming movie. The special access code will be active for 45 days.
Does anyone have any examples of other companies doing this or any directions on if this is even possible/first steps to take?
This is an easy project if you’ve done any web programming before. But it might not be worth the effort to learn a web language, make this thing work, debug, etc.
That said, it’s worth downloading & installing Drupal and checking if there’s a module that can do this for you (it’s likely too, they have a unique and prolific module ecosystem).
By the way, ‘streaming’ is a different concept than just displaying the video on a web page. A streamed video cannot be fast forwarded or rewinded, for example (generally speaking). It’s very well suited for a real-time broadcast or if you want to telecast the video like a TV Show throughout the day.
Embedding the video via a HTML5 tag or a Flash video player is somewhat different, and users can have more control on the playback of the video by default.
For streaming of videos, you will need special software on the server side, like Wowza, Red5 or an instance of Adobe Flash Media Server running on an AWS EC2. For the normal videos, just ensuring you have enough bandwidth will suffice, and you can do it off of any shared host if your traffic is low.