Skoot was developed as a group project for COS 420 - Introduction to Software Engineering - at the University of Maine. Please note that this project is not complete.
The information on this page is from our private respository and was passed by all the members before publishing to my website. The content was generated by every group memeber and therefore should and will be credited appropriately.
Group members:
Dylan Bulmer, Stephen Kaplan, Ben Patashnik, et al.
Development Stack:
Node JS, React, ExpressJS, SQL, Docker
Skoot is a social video streaming service. Unlike other services like YouTube and Vimeo, which place emphasis on content consumption, skoot focuses on the community connection aspects that are minimally present in these other services. For example, users are able to create groups that define specific focus areas. Within these groups, users are encouraged to share videos, playlists, and other content as well as engage with others in their community through discussion, shared video viewing, community events, and more. This being said, skoot is enjoyable for all users, regardless of whether they join groups or not. Outside of groups, users are able to communicate one-to-one or one-to-many through a dedicated chat system. Even without interacting with others, individual users can enjoy improved content discovery through skoot's topic-based recommendation system. Through this, the service provides users with more relevant recommendations than its competitors are able to with their history-influenced systems.
Similar to other video streaming services, skoot provides users the ability to view and comment on content. However, users that are part of the creator's community can further engage by viewing and responding to community-made comments. Choosing to view comments from the community will allow a more friendly and enjoyable environment. Each community can designate users as moderators who can view reports and remove disrespectful comments and users. In this way, skoot can be considered to be similar to Reddit.
As a free service, skoot is supported primarily by short, 5-second ads and supplemented by individual donations. These ads also enable successful and quality content creators to earn money off of the platform. Content creators have the option to disable ads on their channels by paying a small fee per 1000 views. Skoot provides a donation management system that content creators may use to supplement their earnings as well as cover the costs of running their channels without ads, if they desire. Although skoot provides the ability for creators to earn money, our primary concern is with the safety and comfort of our users; as such, the platform uses a flat rate of earnings for all content, regardless of topic, and aggregate, anonymized totals of the ad money and donations that creators receive are necessarily disclosed to users. This transparency further differentiates skoot from other available video streaming services.
Further along the lines of transparency, skoot also places emphasis on the security and privacy of user information. Skoot aims to protect user data through utilizing encryption and anonymization wherever possible (in user login information, relations between users and communities, topics of interest, and more), and through user-facing features like promoting the use of multi-factor authentication. Additionally, skoot features fundamental privacy designs such as: keeping a user's watch history private from other users, enabling users to limit who is able to watch their videos or view their user profile, and allowing the user to hide information about themselves, like age and email address.
Youtube
Youtube and skoot are similar in function in the sense that they both offer a service to stream video. They differ in their mission; skoot aims to be a more social environment by offering features like shared streaming, which allows two or more users to sync their videos to the same time. Because of this shared experience, skoot also provides a way to add friends and build communities by keeping users updated with content that trends within the community, ultimately promoting the social aspect that YouTube lacks.
Floatplane
Floatplane is a video streaming service that allows people to support content creators directly instead of the creators having to rely on advertisements throughout the video. Users pay a monthly fee per content creator to gain access to a catalog of videos. This is similar to skoot because people become part of communities that they actively enjoy. The differences between skoot and Floatplane are that users going to the Floatplane platform know who they want to watch beforehand usually. They are not going onto the platform to discover new content creators, they are going there to support creators they are familiar with. Skoot however, is supposed to allow users to discover new creators as they watch videos. Another difference between skoot and Floatplane is that Floatplane does not contain ads through videos. lacks.
Vimeo
Vimeo is a video storage and streaming website that places a strong emphasis on high-quality content. The site features a relatively small but mature community of content creators that provide constructive feedback to other users. Vimeo also places an emphasis on multiple paid tiers from $7-75 per month for access to premium features. The tight-knit community aspect of Vimeo is one of the major goals of skoot, as it is meant to have a stronger emphasis on like-minded groups, friends, and other social media aspects. However, skoot differs in that it is less focused on high-quality and paid membership, instead attracting amateur users who want to connect with each other.
Reddit
Reddit is a social media site that allows users to create communities called “subreddits”. These subreddits focus on a specific topic or theme and users are free to join, create, and engage with other members of the subreddit. Each subreddit also contains a team of moderators who control the content posted in their respective subreddit. Unlike Reddit, skoot is first-and-foremost a video streaming service, meaning that communities are built around the interactions between video content creators and their audiences.