Cinex — Streaming Platform for the Maldives
A subscription and pay-per-title streaming service for the Maldives. It provides discovery, billing in MVR and automatic account provisioning on media servers, and it is backed by a self-hosted pipeline that takes a title from subscriber request to available in the library.
Overview
Cinex is a premium streaming service built for the Maldives market ("Stream. Buy. Download."). Viewers can subscribe for unlimited streaming or buy single titles to download and keep. Cinex owns discovery, billing, subscriptions and account management. Playback runs on Emby/Jellyfin media servers, where Cinex provisions an account for each subscriber automatically. The platform is a monorepo containing:
- A Laravel API
- A Next.js customer portal
- A Next.js admin panel
- Two microservices
- Self-hosted media infrastructure
Key Features
- Subscriptions & one-off purchases – Monthly, quarterly and annual plans in MVR, plus title purchases that can be downloaded and kept for offline viewing, with no subscription needed.
- Rich discovery – Browse trending titles, movies, TV, genres, studios and networks with TMDB-backed metadata, plus search and title pages.
- 1-minute previews – Visitors who are not subscribed can preview any title. The preview streams over HLS through a token-authenticated proxy with a countdown overlay.
- Title requests – Subscribers request titles that are not yet in the library and are notified by SMS and email when they become available.
- Automatic provisioning – Each subscriber gets a media-server account with library access granted per plan, and users are load-balanced across servers.
- Payments & invoicing – Integrates the Bank of Maldives (BML) payment gateway, generates PDF invoices, and supports multi-currency and crypto checkout.
Technical Highlights
- The backend is a pure JSON API built with Laravel 11 and Sanctum. Business logic lives in service classes (subscriptions, billing, payment gateway, provisioning, notifications), and work runs on dedicated queues.
- There is no local content database. Discovery data comes from Seerr/TMDB and playback data from the media server, and the two are matched by TMDB, TVDB and IMDb IDs.
- A Fastify (Node.js) stream proxy serves HLS with IP-bound, short-lived tokens. A FastAPI (Python) service curates the home-page content asynchronously.
- The media servers are self-hosted on Proxmox VMs with shared NFS storage, keeping library paths identical across machines.
- The JavaScript apps are built in a pnpm and Turborepo monorepo with shared packages (UI, API client, types, Tailwind preset), and the services are containerised with Docker.
My Role
Architected and built the platform end to end: the API, the web portals, the streaming microservices and the self-hosted media infrastructure.
Tech Stack
Gallery
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