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Spotify video coming to iOS next week w/ content from ESPN, BBC, Vice Media, more

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According to a report this morning from The Wall Street Journal, Spotify is getting ready to finally launch its video content offerings. The rollout is set to start with the Android app getting video by the end of this week, but the iOS app is following suit by the end of next…

Spotify has been testing video content for some small number of users over the last few months, and now the company is finally pushing the product to the masses. Content that Spotify has lined up—mostly “short clips,” according to the report—is coming from ESPN, Comedy Central, the BBC, Vice Media and Maker Studios, among others.

“We are at the end of a journey of testing,” said Shiva Rajaraman, Spotify’s VP of product in an interview with WSJ. “We are going out effectively as planned. Our goal was largely to get a wide breadth of content and experiment and test.”

Spotify has been taking its sweet time getting this feature out to the public to the chagrin of “some media partners,” but the company learned a lot during the testing period. The company found it was “offering too many ways” for people to find video, for example, leading to the creation of “programming packages”. They seem similar to Spotify’s in-house curated playlists, with names like “Laughs at Lunch” or “News of the Week”, geared at contextually matching your music interests.

It’s an interesting move, but not exactly a surprising one in a world where it seems all services want to give you everything. Messaging apps like Snapchat (even more so lately), WhatsApp, Hangouts and Facebook Messenger want to be the app that does all the things, social networks like Twitter, Google+, and Facebook want to be the social networks that do all the things, and content streaming services apparently aren’t an exception.

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Comments

  1. applegetridofsimandjack - 8 years ago

    It will take another 10 years before Spotify video makes it to other countries like Belgium

  2. chrisl84 - 8 years ago

    Psh, why Apple Music killed them 6 months ago, remember

  3. rnc - 8 years ago

    Now I have to pay for YouTube videos? LOL

  4. rahhbriley - 8 years ago

    How pissed is Eddy Cue?

  5. vkd108 - 8 years ago

    Only one problem: none of the listed so-called content providers have anything even vaguely worth watching (unless, of course, you are completely at a loss with what to do with yourself at a particular moment in time).

Author

Avatar for Stephen Hall Stephen Hall

Stephen is Growth Director at 9to5. If you want to get in touch, follow me on Twitter. Or, email at stephen (at) 9to5mac (dot) com, or an encrypted email at hallstephenj (at) protonmail (dot) com.