Roger Fingas
Spotify is taking its first steps into streaming video with an Android rollout this week, followed by the introduction of iOS support the next, the company announced on Monday.
Video will also initially be restricted to the U.S., U.K., Germany, and the service's home country of Sweden, the company told the Wall Street Journal. Some content partners include the BBC, ESPN, Comedy Central, Vice, and Maker Studios.
Many videos will be clips from existing shows, but a few partners — such as Tastemade — are working on original programming. Spotify's VP of product, Shiva Rajaraman, added that videos will often be contextual, whether simply related to music or based on a person's individual music tastes.
In some cases videos will be grouped into themed packages much like its music playlists, some examples being "News of the Week" or "Laughs at Lunch."
Unusually the new content is launching not only as a mobile-only proposition, but without ads and to all subscribers, not just Premium customers. This is mostly to get people more engaged with Spotify, though ads are likely eventually.
Video plans were originally announced in May. The past several months have been spent testing the feature with a small subset of subscribers in the four initial launch markets.
The addition could help differentiate Spotify from Apple Music, which doesn't really offer video apart from sporadic music videos and other clips hosted on Connect.
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3 Comments
Spotify has poor family pricing. I ditched then for a family plan with YouTube Red. Which is a much better differentiator.
and their videos sound like promos or rather ads.