Spotify has been promising a video component for quite some time.
Well, that time has come. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the music-streaming service will be introducing its highly-anticipated video content on its Android app beginning this week, with the iOS app to get the same experience by the end of next week. The video product will be only available via Spotify's mobile platform right now, while it remains to be seen if the desktop version gets the enhancement as well.
The news comes after Spotify had originally announced plans to distribute videos and podcasts last spring. According to the Journal, they advanced those plans by testing video on its apps over the past several months, affecting less than 10 percent of its users in the launch markets of the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Sweden.
Shiva Rajaraman, Spotify's vice president of product, told the Journal that the video content is mostly short clips at this point, although some developers are creating original series, customized for Spotify.
"We are at the end of a journey of testing," Rajaraman said. "We are going out effectively as planned. Our goal was largely to get a wide breadth of content and experiment and test."
The video content suggested to users will be based on the kind of music they listen to. During the early stages of testing, Maker Studios' comedic rap series, Epic Rap Battles, has registered as being one of the more popular video series with users.
Part of the music-streaming platform's challenge is to get its 75 million users worldwide, who are there to enjoy tunes, to watch videos.
"Obviously our primary user is a music fan, and they are not necessarily leaning in and looking into the app," Rajaraman said. "So there are no particular recipes for how to get this right."
The other part of that is actually carving a lane and having a presence in an online video market dominated by YouTube, Facebook and Snapchat.
Spotify's video content will be available to all its users once it launches this week and late next week on Android and iOS platforms, respectively.
"This [launch] is fundamentally about giving music fans what they want," Rajaraman said. "We are doing fine on monetization. This is primarily a demand play."
