Case Study
Darkwood Brew
A Netflix-style group membership site for Christian mystics.Â
Objectives
The Darkwood Brew website needed to be able to serve up thousands of hours of secured audio and video to people with active memberships, traditional e-commerce elements, and event promotion when new material was produced. It needed to do all of that while evoking the Christian mysticism that can only be found in the dark wood of the soul.Â
Services
Web Design
E-Commerce
Membership
Video Hosting
Podcasting
Emulating Netflix
Darkwood Brew had collected thousands of hours of audio and video content they wanted to offer for streaming and downloading to paid subscribers, meaning that content needed to be secured. Servers that optimized for web hosting often make poor choices for hosting large video collections. We employed a sophisticated system using Amazon S3, similar to the one Netflix used.
Then we had to build the e-commerce system to sell memberships and restrict file access to different types of memberships. Darkwood has four different types of membership, each with its own type of access. Later on, we added the capacity to buy single series for streaming or digital downloads, in addition to the DVD sales we launched with.Â
We have always enjoyed personalized, flexible service from Aboundant. We benefit from their creative thinking and ideas and a deep commitment to making the online experience at our site not only engaging but meaningful.
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Rev. Eric Elnes
Director of Darkwood Brew
Live Events
When the site launched, Darkwood Brew was doing weekly online worship services. Aboundant handled both the streaming and online promotion of these events, including embedding the stream into the website and promoting the events through mass email and social media marketing.Â
We’ve also helped Darkwood Brew to launch three podcasts for both live steaming and archival through popular podcasting networks. These pods have amassed a massive amount of downloads over the years.
