Data Function

Case study · Custom software · Media platform

MovieSimple: A private streaming platform to host your own video library and take it anywhere

A Netflix-style experience for content you already own: connect a Google Drive folder or a home computer, and MovieSimple catalogues, enriches and streams your library to the web, phones and TVs, with no third-party content and no vendor lock-in.

Client
Data Function product
What we did
Web platform · Media pipeline · Mobile and TV apps
Sector
Media and streaming
Region
Canada
Preview environment (opens in a new tab)
MovieSimple home on a tablet-width screen: the Ice Age hero with Play, Trailer and My List actions, and the Continue Watching row
Artwork, ratings and titles shown belong to their owners (IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, TMDB) and appear only to illustrate the interface.

01

The problem

Households, creators and organizations with their own video libraries who want a modern streaming experience without handing their content to a platform.

  • Video files sit in folders with unreadable names, no artwork, no ratings and no way to resume on another device.
  • Streaming a large file from cloud storage to a phone or TV without transcoding or buffering is hard to get right.
  • Commercial platforms own the catalogue, the recommendations and the data.

02

The solution

  • A scanner that reads the library from Google Drive, identifies each title with TMDB and OMDb and a low-cost language model for messy file names, and builds a catalogue with artwork, ratings, awards and trailers.
  • A media pipeline that fetches, remuxes to HLS and serves signed, time-limited streams through nginx, with adaptive renditions for slow connections.
  • A Next.js web app with home rows, search and filters, Continue Watching, My List and recommendations, and a Django API with invite-only households and profiles; Expo apps for phones and Android TV follow.

03

Security and privacy

  • Invite-only households with per-profile access
  • Read-only access to the owner's Drive folder, scoped to the library root
  • Signed, expiring media URLs validated on every request
  • Containers run unprivileged on a read-only file system

04

Results

  • Running on our preview environment with a real library: scan, enrichment, playback and recommendations verified end to end.
  • 66-table data model, 1,100+ backend tests and 300+ web tests behind it.

05

Built with

  • Next.js
  • Django 5
  • Celery
  • MySQL
  • Redis
  • ffmpeg / HLS
  • React Native (Expo)

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