Imagine this: instead of being heavily dependent on Instagram, Facebook, Quora, etc., you could have all these social media features inside your app. A user could engage with the brand and other users' content through rich images, reels, long-form videos, gifs, audio, and many other formats.

Not only will this make the in-app experience, more exciting but it will also be visually more appealing. All of these can be enabled by adding what we call MultiMedia Features.

For every business, user engagement hinges on seamless, high-quality media experiences. Therefore, multi-media design guidelines are not just best practices—they are essential strategies for ensuring both product success and engineering efficiency.

In this blog we’ll take a look at the types and relevance of multimedia, how media handling works for each of them, the engineering challenges of building them, key features for effective multimedia handling, and how to decide between building in-house and using a 3rd party solution. Let’s dig in:

Multimedia handling: Definition and Overview

Multimedia or media handling refers to the process of managing, processing, and delivering various forms of media—images, videos, and audio—across digital platforms. This involves storing and retrieving these media files and optimizing them for performance, security, and user experience.

Relevance for Product Success and Engineering Efficiency

Effective media handling can significantly impact the usability and appeal of a product. For engineering teams, it’s about striking the right balance between performance and resource management, ensuring that the infrastructure can scale while maintaining top-notch performance. Poor media handling can lead to slow load times, increased latency, and security vulnerabilities—issues that can derail both product success and user satisfaction.

Understanding Multimedia Handling & The Considerations For Each Category

The starting point for engineering teams when building multimedia features is to identify each and every type of multimedia feature category they will require to enable a specific user experience in their product and then define the structure for dealing with the smaller nuances for them. To get you started here is a list of the features and the consideration required for them:

Images (JPEG, PNG)

Handling images involves considering factors like file size, resolution, and format. JPEG is widely used for photographs due to its balance between quality and compression, while PNG is preferred for graphics with transparency. Depending upon your users you may need one or all of them. For eg: in online consultations and coaching, a JPEG format is needed to share symptom pictures, progress pictures, etc. The same goes for a testimonial use case where a user is sharing their travel experience.

Key considerations include:

• Compression: Reducing file size without significant quality loss. 
• Responsive Design: Ensuring images scale correctly across devices.
• Accessibility: Alt text for images to enhance usability.

GIF, Stickers, Emojis

GIFs, stickers, and emojis are increasingly popular for enhancing user interaction and expression in digital platforms. GIFs, due to their short animations, can significantly increase engagement but require careful handling due to their larger file sizes and potential to slow down page performance. Stickers and emojis, while generally smaller in size, need to be optimized for quick loading and consistent rendering across different devices and platforms.

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Key considerations include:

• File Size Management: Compressing GIFs to reduce their impact on performance while maintaining animation quality.
• Compatibility: Ensuring that stickers and emojis render consistently across various devices, operating systems, and browsers.
• User Experience: Search handling for GIFs, Stickers, and Emojis. Providing options to save them, size variations for sending just emojis vs using them with text, etc.

Videos (MP4, AVI, MOV)

Videos are more complex due to their larger file sizes and higher bandwidth requirements. MP4 is the standard due to its compatibility and compression efficiency, while AVI and MOV may be used for specific use cases.

Key considerations include:

• Resolution and Bitrate: Balancing quality with performance.
• Adaptive Streaming: Delivering the best quality based on the user’s bandwidth. [quality auto selection]
• Playback Consistency: Ensuring smooth playback across devices.

Audio (MP3, WAV, AAC)

Audio handling, while less resource-intensive than video, still demands attention to quality and format. MP3 is the most popular due to its balance between quality and compression, while WAV is used for high-fidelity audio.

Key considerations include:

• Compression: Managing quality versus file size.
• Streaming: Ensuring uninterrupted playback.
• Synchronization: Especially important in media involving both audio and video.

Essential Features for Effective Media Handling

Before we start discussing the challenges of building multimedia infrastructure, let’s look at some of the essential features to keep in mind for a seamless experience for the end user:

User Experience (UX) and Performance Aspects

• Seamless Upload and Playback: Users expect quick and easy media uploads and instant playback without glitches.
• Intuitive Media Management: The ability to organize and retrieve media effortlessly.
• Fast And Consistent Load Time Using Cache Strategies: Ensuring media loads quickly and performs reliably under various conditions.

Technical Aspects

• Compression and Optimization Techniques: Efficient compression algorithms that minimize file size without compromising quality.
• Streaming and Playback Protocols: Utilizing protocols like HLS or DASH for adaptive streaming and consistent playback.
• Real-time Media Processing and Transformation: On-the-fly media processing for tasks such as resizing, cropping, or applying filters.
• Multi-Video Support: Managing autoplay for multiple videos on the screen adds complexity. The logic must determine which video plays based on screen space ratios, pausing and muting others.

Engineering Challenges in Multimedia Handling & Comparison Between Building In-House vs Using 3rd Party Solutions

The challenge for the engineering team isn’t just building multimedia features and the processes around their handling but also considering the implications of all the current and future requirements. This assessment is critical since feature building and scaling are costly both in terms of time and money.

A fair estimation of current requirements and future needs can help make better decisions around building in-house or using 3rd party solutions (more on that later). Here is a summary of the engineering as well as other challenges and which option is better for each of the challenges:

Now let’s look at each one of these requirements in detail:

Storage Requirements

Media files, especially high-definition videos, and high-resolution images, can quickly consume vast amounts of storage. For example, a single minute of 4K video can require several gigabytes of storage space. Engineering teams must consider not just the current storage needs, but also how these needs will grow exponentially as the user base expands and the volume of media increases. 

Managing this growth in-house involves investing in robust storage infrastructure, such as scalable databases and distributed file systems, and ensuring these systems are optimized for performance and reliability. This is particularly challenging when considering redundancy, backup, and disaster recovery solutions. Maintaining such infrastructure requires continuous monitoring and upgrades, which can divert significant engineering resources from core product development.

On the other hand, when using a 3rd party solution the focus is on ensuring that the provider is following data security and compliance requirements when storing sensitive multimedia related to your end user.

Important Questions To Ask Before Starting:

• How to handle storage to achieve lossless optimization without high storage costs
• Upload failure related:some text
• How will the retry be handled?
• Does the process restart at the point of failure or from the beginning?
• Where is the partial storage maintained during the upload process?

Scalability

Scalability is a critical challenge in media handling. As the user base grows, the infrastructure must scale seamlessly to accommodate increased demand. This includes scaling the storage, processing power, and bandwidth to handle spikes in media uploads and downloads, as well as streaming requirements.

Building an in-house scalable solution requires expertise in distributed systems, load balancing, and network optimization. Engineers must design systems that can dynamically allocate resources, ensuring that performance remains consistent even under heavy load. Additionally, they must account for geographical distribution, which often involves setting up and managing content delivery networks (CDNs) to ensure low-latency access to media across different regions.

Third-party solutions, particularly those offered by cloud providers, often come with built-in scalability features. These providers have already invested in global infrastructure, offering automatic scaling, load balancing, and CDN integration. Leveraging these solutions can significantly reduce the engineering burden, allowing teams to focus on product-specific challenges rather than infrastructure management.

Important Questions To Ask Before Starting:

• When should CDN support be added to reduce latency at scale
• What are the projected usage patterns?
• How will storage requirements evolve?
• What are the security implications of scaling?
• Are there third-party solutions that can simplify scaling?

User Experience Elements

User experience is at the center when designing media handling processes and guidelines. Users expect instant access to media files, whether it's streaming a video or loading an image gallery. High latency or slow load times can lead to poor user experiences, reducing engagement and potentially driving users away.

In-house solutions must be finely tuned to optimize media delivery. This involves implementing techniques like caching, lazy loading, and prefetching, as well as optimizing server response times. Engineers also need to consider how media is encoded, compressed, and transmitted over the network to minimize latency.

Achieving consistently low latency is particularly challenging when serving a global audience. It requires deploying infrastructure close to users, which can mean setting up data centers in multiple regions or relying on a globally distributed CDN. These are complex and costly endeavors that require specialized knowledge and ongoing maintenance.

Third-party providers, particularly those with global reach, offer optimized infrastructure that reduces latency and ensures fast media delivery regardless of user location. By utilizing these services, engineering teams can achieve high performance without the need to build and manage a complex, distributed infrastructure themselves.

Important Questions To Ask Before Starting:

• Voice note creation
• Handling aspect ratios of images
• Draw/write options in image editing
• Filters on content and remixing content
• Resume where you left off or play from the start
• PDF viewer - in-app, 3rd party or download without opening
• Which video to play if more than 1 video is showing on screen

Security Considerations and Data Privacy

Security is a major concern in media handling, especially when dealing with user-generated content. Media files can be targets for a variety of attacks, including unauthorized access, tampering, and distribution of malicious content. Additionally, there are significant data privacy concerns, particularly when handling sensitive or personally identifiable information (PII).

Building a secure media handling solution in-house requires implementing strong encryption, secure access controls, and compliance with various data protection regulations (such as GDPR, CCPA, etc.). Engineers must also develop and maintain secure APIs, manage user authentication, and ensure that all media interactions are logged and monitored for suspicious activity.

Data privacy is further complicated by the need to handle media files that may contain personally identifiable information (PII). Ensuring that this data is protected at all times—during upload, storage, and playback—requires rigorous security protocols and regular audits.

Many third-party solutions are designed with security as a core feature. They offer built-in encryption, access controls, and compliance with global data protection regulations. By using these services, engineering teams can leverage the provider’s expertise in security and data privacy, reducing the risk of vulnerabilities and ensuring that the product complies with relevant laws.

Important Questions To Ask Before Starting:

• Allowing downloading or not
• Allowing Screenshots or not
• NSFW filters

Cost and Resource Allocation

Building and maintaining an in-house media handling solution is resource-intensive. It requires not only significant upfront investment in infrastructure and development but also ongoing maintenance, monitoring, and upgrades. Engineers must dedicate time and effort to optimizing performance, ensuring scalability, and addressing security vulnerabilities.

For many organizations, these efforts can distract from core product development and innovation. The opportunity cost of building in-house can be substantial, particularly if it delays the release of new features or hinders the product’s ability to compete in the market.

Third-party solutions offer a cost-effective alternative. By leveraging these services, organizations can avoid the high costs of infrastructure and ongoing maintenance, instead paying only for the resources they use. This allows engineering teams to focus on building features that differentiate the product, rather than reinventing the wheel with custom media handling infrastructure.

Important Questions To Ask Before Starting:

• Implications on cost and resource allocation based on the questions in previous sections
• Balancing resource allocation at scale while keeping costs lesser

Other Factors Of Build vs. Buy Evaluation

While engineering resources are most critical in the evaluation, there are some other factors that need to be considered for an efficient, overall evaluation. Let’s discuss them:

Feature Importance

If media handling is a core feature of your product, like in the case of Instagram, Snapchat, etc. building a custom solution might be necessary. However, for most use cases, third-party solutions can meet requirements effectively.

Product Roadmap

Building an in-house solution requires significant space on the product roadmap. Enough to require deprioritization of other critical features. If the team is already stretched and multimedia handling is part of a use case similar to those we discussed earlier, leveraging an existing end-to-end solution can be more pragmatic.

Implication for Business Strategy and Prioritization

Consider how media handling aligns with your broader business strategy. If rapid deployment is critical, buying might be the better option. Conversely, if customization and control are paramount, building may be justified.

Conclusion

Media handling is a complex but crucial piece of the user experience puzzle. From engineering challenges to strategic decisions around building or using 3rd party solutions, evaluating all the possible scenarios is essential for delivering high-quality, scalable, and secure digital experiences. By understanding the nuances of each media type and the associated technical considerations and mapping them against the in-app use case, engineering teams can make informed decisions that drive product success and efficiency.

About LikeMinds

A plug-and-play infrastructure that comes with state-of-the-art multimedia handling processes built into the Chat and Feed SDKs. Our pre-built themes can enable a range of use cases such as shoppable feeds, marketplace chats, online consultations social feeds, and more for your product where multimedia plays a critical role — all in a time frame of just 15 mins. Check out our range of themes or directly book a demo to see how it works!