July 8th, 2024
A New Era for Uscreen’s Product
TL;DR In Q2 2024, we sharpened our focus on three core use cases that have thrived on the Uscreen:
- Streaming Platform and Services
- Membership Community
- Digital Wellness Studio
These areas reflect Uscreen’s impact across various markets while staying true to our core strengths: video and recurring revenue. By focusing on what we do best, we are committed to delivering outstanding value to our current and future customers.
Returning to our roots
Over the past year, we’ve pushed towards the broader creator economy narrative. This shift led to feedback from some of our most successful customers, saying, “I know we might not be your core customer profile, but we really need ____.” This was a wake-up call for us.
We realized there isn’t a need for yet another creator economy platform—our strength lies in serving specific, dedicated niches. In trying to define our “one ideal customer,” we neglected some of our most important customers and their needs. Therefore, we want to focus on three prominent use cases we believe our product serves well today and should continuously enable tomorrow:
- Streaming platform and services: Host, distribute, and stream your premium on-demand and live content to reach both local and global audiences.
- Membership community: Monetize your skills and knowledge by offering exclusive memberships that deliver resources, guidance, and peer support.
- Digital wellness studio: Deliver a studio-like experience at home with workout or yoga practices, a sense of community, and direct access to instructors.
Given the diverse ways Uscreen is used, developing features for every use case can be challenging. To address this, we’re re-embracing our customer-centric approach: collaborating closely with a few customers in each use case to test and experiment on a small scale. This method allows us to drive impact and deliver features that provide measurable value to their businesses. Once validated, we’ll roll out these features to everyone.
Uscreen’s success has always come from partnering closely with a select group of amazing customers and building everything they need for a thriving video business. We believe this customer-centric approach is the way forward.
Refining our approach to product development
Introducing Alpha Testing
To ship features that truly work and enhance our customers’ day-to-day operations, we’ve launched the Alpha Test group program. This initiative allows us to test new features early, ensuring they bring real value to your business.
If you have at least 5,000 active subscribers, an English locale for your storefront, apps, and are interested in joining, contact your Customer Success Manager.
Balancing Improvement and Innovation
Moving forward, our Product team will adopt an 80/20 rule: 80% of our efforts will focus on improving current features and their benefits, while 20% will be dedicated to experimenting with new, riskier ideas. This balance helps us maintain our bootstrapped spirit and agile approach, prioritizing improvements that deliver quicker value.
Projects we worked on in Q2
We've already rolled out most of the features unless we've made a special note about them.
Community
- Community posts streamlined: We aligned the user experience for community posts across web and mobile platforms. Prioritized features like liking posts and following users to enhance engagement and retention.
- Remove channel limit: No more limits on the number of public and private channels, allowing you to segment your community as you see fit.
- Improve like list: Clearly display who likes posts and comments to encourage further interaction.
Video Experience
- Automatic caption generation: Every video uploaded to Uscreen now automatically receives a transcribed caption track to enhance accessibility.
- Video chapter on timeline: Labeled video chapters in the description now appear on the video player timeline across all apps and devices.
- DVR/Rewind on web, mobile, TV apps - Web released. App coming soon: For users to rewind live streams across all platforms.
- Simultaneous viewing limits - Beta available: Prevent account sharing by setting limits on the number of active sessions.
- Sign in with email - Beta available: Quickly sign in by clicking a link in email. No need to remember passwords.
- Live stream improvements: Multiple QoL changes to live stream studio and rewind.
Billing
- Subscription management: Added easy-to-use popup modals for applying coupons, adding subscriptions, canceling, and deleting subscriptions.
- Native Paypal: Replaced our Braintree -> PayPal integration with a self-serve option that can be connected in under 5 minutes.
- Stripe Billing - Opt-in available; contact your success manager: Integrated more deeply with Stripe, expanding support for payment methods like Apple Pay and SEPA.
- Tax support - Beta available: Deployed Stripe Tax to automatically calculate appropriate taxes at checkout for direct remittance via Stripe.
- Subscription price increase tool: Creators can now raise prices for existing members and send an email notification directly from the subscription setup interface.
Mobile Apps
- Watch videos while listening to music: Specifically for the digital wellness use case, allowing members to enjoy their choice of music while doing their workout/yoga routines.
- Internal tooling: Ensuring apps remain up-to-date and developer accounts stay in good standing.
- Compact Player: YouTube-like interaction to allow videos to continue playing in a small window while users browse other stuff.
- E-Commerce Links - Coming soon: Achieve parity with Web by offering in-video product cards.
What's next?
We’re finalizing our Q3 roadmap and will share it with you in an upcoming blog post. Stay tuned!