Netzkino
Netzkino is a German movie streaming company which offers an always-increasing range of movies that can be legally streamed and viewed for free without registration and without any hidden costs or obligations to the users. This is a long-lasting and deep collaboration that we are especially proud of.
When we first started, Netzkino only existed as an idea. Now, Netzkino is available almost anywhere where German consumers might enjoy watching their favorite movies. As their technological consultant and service partner, we delivered an all-encompassing technological solution from scratch, ranging from backend services and the creation of APIs all the way to various front-end solutions like the netzkino.de website and apps for iOS, Android, Windows 8.1, Windows Phone and SmartTVs. We always made sure that Netzkino would run seamlessly and use the best technologies that each platform has to offer. To make a long story short: Netzkino always feels familiar no matter where a customer might use it, but it also feels right at home on a smaller iPhone screen and on the big screen a SmartTV can provide.
Netzkino.de – it all began with this website. During the course of working with Netzkino, we often broke new ground. We were among the pioneers to implement video commercials (Online Video Advertising) that are shown before and after movies, so-called pre-rolls and post-rolls. We were also the first ones to advertise legal and free as the marketing beacons of what we were doing here. We stood up to much larger companies as they followed suit in this marketing approach. “Legal and free” is now in widespread use as our competitors, like MyVideo.de, have started to use those same terms. We built from scratch using the best technology available and made sure that every detail was done right. Our caching APIs and the cloud-powered back-end technologies for storing the movie files make sure that this website can handle 2 million and more visits and request each day. Load times are exceptionally fast due to deep optimization. We tweaked the website and its contents through the help of SEO methods so that users would quickly find movies hosted on Netzkino using their favorite search engines. Deep social media linking like Facebook Connect make it easy for the user to tell their friends what movies they are watching and which ones they recommend. All of this is also true for every app that we built:
Our Android app is optimized to work best with all Android versions, but will work especially well on devices running Android 4.0 Jelly Bean and above. We wrote this app with maximum performance in mind. It works really well on all Android-powered devices and on various screen sizes, ranging from 4″ over 7 and 8″ all the way to 10″. To accomplish that, we created an adjusted UI layout in portrait and landscape for each of the major screen sizes, making this app work well on phones, “phablets” and full 10″ tablets. For low-end devices, a special fallback option was implemented so that non-HD content was shown instead of the more demanding HD options, just to make sure this app would run on as many Android devices as possible.
This Netzkino app for iOS is available for all iPhones, iPads and iPod touches running iOS 6 and above. It specifically supports Retina displays and uses screen real estate best on both devices, portrait mode on iPhone and landscape mode on iPad. We accomplished something that other said wasn’t possible at the time: we were the first ones to implement pre-roll video commercials, even when everyone was saying that that wasn’t possible under the Apple guidelines. The app was ranked the No. 1 iPad app and ranked among the Top 10 free iPhone apps in the German App Store. We support full HD playback and users can even stream all content to their TVs via AirPlay, should they want to. Facebook Connect allows user to share their movie watching habits with all their friends.
This Windows 8.1 Netzkino app was written with the special features in mind that this OS has to offer. Smart Search is available on all pages, sharing is possible via the Charms Bar, server-side Live Tiles push new content straight to the user’s Start Screen and Snap View support makes sure the app works well in multitasking environments. Semantic Zoom can be used to scroll through the categories faster. We used Microsoft’s Ad SDK to implement advertising and brought over the familiar Netzkino aesthetics while combining them with the special clean, flat and multi-size grid layout used in Windows 8.1 apps. We were picked by Microsoft as a top partner since we were closely following their app guidelines and were therefore featured on the Windows Store start page as a top app in the entertainment section.
Netzkino for Window Phone is our latest member in the ever-increasing family of Netzkino apps. Just like with the Windows 8.1 app, we made sure that users would feel right at home: content is beautifully laid out in grids. Categories, new movies and highlights are just one wipe away from the start page thanks to the panorama view concept. Search and sharing are always available via the bottom bar. Content is key. That is especially true on smaller devices, so we automatically hide the Windows Phone status bar. The app supports all native Windows Phone screen resolutions. To achieve feature parity with all the other mobile Netzkino apps, we also built in Facebook Connect and feedback and app review buttons on the imprint page.
