Universal Music wanted to create a premium video content platform that could attract viewers into their platform. We faced the challenge of creating the platform that could deliver a superior user experience to convince viewers and music fans to get into the subscription service.
One goal was to stop unauthorized versions of their content on YouTube, so instead of just building a competing site, also use the YouTube API to control and manage their content using one interface.
Our goals included generating new revenue streams for content creators and provide brand advertisers unprecedented access to a highly engaged audience.
Additionally, we created a modern, robust backend architecture that allowed our platform to provide a better, more engaging and rewarding viewing experience, justifying the subscription costs.
By seeding the platform with premium, high quality content, and providing a more personalized and engaging viewing experience, we created the mechanism to attract our best customers into the platform, and trigger the positive network effects to attract more music producers and artists, which in turn attracted more viewers and fans, turning VEVO into the global premium music video platform it is today.
In its first three weeks, VEVO pulled in more than 35 million unique visitors, becoming the most visited music network in the US for that month.
Blending UMG’s broad catalog of top artists and content with YouTube’s leading-edge video technology and user community, VEVO now does for music videos what Hulu has done for television and movie programming online.
I was part of the original engineering team that created VEVO’s core platform and deliver the first version of the platform. I was responsible for Technical leadership, backend modular and decoupled architecture, complete architecture and implementation of the bespoke content management solution, front-end integration architecture and development leadership, hands-on backend implementation, database and search engine integration, and user experience modular architecture and integration.