The Vuulr team hasn’t just been busy on preparing for our ICO in the last few months…
(psst… it’s LIVE now! Head on over to https://www.qryptos.com/ico/VUU!)…
…we’ve also been working hard on building what will be become the first iteration of the Vuulr Marketplace. I wanted to take this opportunity to give you a sneak preview of what it will look like and share a bit more about our product roadmap.
As always, we’re always happy to hear from you — drop us a comment and let us know what you think!
The Marketplace — What to Expect
Title Discovery
We thought a lot about how the Marketplace should be both a platform for transacting, but — and arguably, more importantly — it needs to be a platform of discovery. After all, if the buyer can’t find what their audience is looking for, then there won’t be much transacting going on.
Right off the bat, we decided that Title Discovery needs to be engaging. It’s the content that should sell itself! We took cues from popular Video on Demand platforms, and how they emphasize the content — taking full advantage of the brilliant content assets uploaded by our sellers.
We’re excited about continuously improving Title Discovery by
- tapping into audience profiling,
- machine learning, and
- bringing in 3rd party data to drive recommendation (e.g. content performance and ratings).
Buyer — Make an Offer
We’re still refining this step in the journey, and no doubt it will continue to be evolve as time goes on. Making an offer can be confusing, even for the seasoned professional — you need to worry about the 1) geographies you want to buy content for, 2) the different rights types (VOD, Free to Air, Pay TV, etc.), 3) the time period of the license, 4) whether you want it exclusively, and finally, 5) whether you want to employ holdback restrictions.
The user experience design is critical to ensure the process is as intuitive as possible for the buyer (and seller).
Buyer and Seller Dashboard
Whether you’re a content buyer or seller, you need to be able to understand the entire lifecycle of each deal, which deals are waiting for your action, which ones are stuck with the counter party, etc. Sellers will need to know which Titles’ Rights are currently locked up, and more importantly, which ones are going to become available soon. Buyers will also need to know what Rights they currently poses, and which ones will expire soon.
We’re designing the Dashboards to give you all this information on one page, allowing you to, at quick glance, take stock of everything that’s happening, and where necessary, drill down for the details
Marketplace Mock-ups are for illustrative purposes only and do not represent, nor should they imply that these Titles are or will be listed on the upcoming Vuulr Marketplace.
If you are a content buyer or seller, and would like a first-look at the marketplace prior to its launch, please contact marketing@vuulr.com to arrange for a demo session.
Roadmap
Here we are — it’s May 2018 — the public sale has gone live!
As mentioned earlier, we’ve been incredibly busy on both prepping for the ICO, and working on the Marketplace build. We have some fairly ambitious targets, some of which I’ve outlined below. But for more details, please do take a look at our Whitepaper.
- Early Q3 2018 — Marketplace MVP
Launch of the Marketplace, with a focus on the Seller’s Journey. This will enable Vuulr to ramp up Seller and Content acquisition onto the platform.
Throughout Q3, the team will be focusing on signing up Sellers/Content Owners and ingesting Titles.
- Mid to Late Q3 2018 — Content Industry Supply Chain Protocol (“CISP”) and MetaData Refinery MVP
Early public prototyping of the key components of the Supply Chain, namely Title Unique Identification, MetaData management, and Avails management. This will be built into the blockchain.
Launch of the MetaData Refinery — our TV and Film MetaData crowd-sourcing platform that will provide the foundation for the Vuulr Rewards program.
- Q4 2018 — Marketplace Enhancements for Buyers
The focus of this major release will be on the Buyer and Content Discovery.
This phase will see not only continued push on Seller on-boarding, but a major focus of getting Buyers onto the platform. We expect to start seeing transactions at this stage.
Into 2019, we will continuously improve and evolve our platforms and we’ll be sharing more news on this front as time goes on and our plans firm up.
Chris Drumgoole is the Chief Technology Officer of Vuulr. Connect with Chris on his LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisdrum/ and on Twitter at https://twitter.com/cdrum.