Announcing Plio - make your videos powerful
Plio empowers creators to make their videos interactive and gather rich analytics on user engagement
Plio is an open-source tool with the mission of unlocking the true potential of videos.
Today, videos have become the dominant method of communication and information dissemination, everywhere from teaching, corporate training, onboarding and interviewing to surveys, awareness campaigns and mass communication with various stakeholders.
Yet, engagement on videos remains low as the interaction is one-way and creators have no data on how viewers engage with their videos beyond basic aggregate statistics. People have been trying various hacks by combining YouTube videos with other platforms like Google forms, Google slides, WhatsApp and bit.ly to improve engagement and collect data.
Enter: Plio
5 times increase in engagement
Plio was originally developed within Avanti Fellows - a 10-year old non-profit based in India with the mission of empowering students from low-income backgrounds to have fulfilling careers in STEM. During the COVID-19 lockdown, all schools were shut and videos became the only feasible mode of teaching the students online. However, engagement was quite low.
Plios were introduced as an experiment by overlaying questions on their videos.
Students loved learning through plios because for the first time they could actually interact with the content - just like they would in school. Over many months, we consistently saw a 5 times increase in engagement compared to simply learning through YouTube.
We are completely open-source
Which means you can:
We have worked hard over the past month to make our documentation easy to understand and such that you can set it up without any additional support. I am very proud to announce that Plio is now available in private beta. To join the waitlist, click here.
The product highlights for this version include:
A complete visual redesign to simplify the process of
creating,sharingandanalyzing.A new web-based Creator tool that enables any creator to very easily add questions on top of any YouTube video - which works on both laptop and mobile.
A new web-based Player that works on both laptop and mobile, while saving every progress.
A new home page to manage all plios that you have created.
The first version of the dashboard displaying summary statistics for each plio with the option to download a CSV dump of all the data that we collect on how each user has engaged with your plio.
Support for creating organizations and managing the plios created by several team members.
Support for authentication through phone-based OTP or Google Sign In.
Each user can now belong to multiple workspaces and easily switch workspaces.
Support for switching between different languages.
From a developer’s perspective, here are a few important changes that we made:
Dockerizing our frontend and backend repositories so that installation becomes independent of the OS and very fast.
Setting up a highly scalable serverless architecture using AWS Fargate.
We are using Github Actions for Continuous Deployment (CD).
We migrated (no pun intended) from storing our data in JSON files on S3 to a PostgreSQL database with Django.
We are now using the Django Rest Framework (DRF) for handling API calls. This helped us standardize our API calls, reduce a lot of redundant code and have a standardized codebase through the templates provided by DRF.
We are using Tailwind CSS along with VueJS for our frontend. Tailwind has one of the best documentation I have ever seen for a library that is so extensive.
Check out our Github and start contributing by identifying bugs, making feature requests, resolving issues and contributing features.
Way forward
We have a lot of exciting feature additions coming up over the next month including new interaction types, new question types, making plios embeddable, adding reactions to plios, setting the video speed, etc.
We are currently formalizing a partnership to support the at-home learning of all the students in Delhi & Madhya Pradesh given that schools are going to be shut for the next few months too.
We are already in conversations with education institutes outside India that are keen to use Plio in their learning activities.
If you are interested in becoming an early adopter of Plio and defining the next set of features that we build, click below:
If you enjoyed reading this post or found it valuable in any shape or form, it is very likely that someone else would too.
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Best wishes,
Team Plio