Happy (belated) New Year (and Chinese New Year) everyone!
Some of you may have noticed that we’ve been rather quiet over the last few months. This isn’t because we’re hiding or going anywhere; we’ve been 100% focused on our platform and our business and we’re excited with what the future has in store.
Since our “soft-launch” in September (2018), our marketplace has grown in both usage and features. Before I get into what’s new in the platform, I wanted to share a couple of key numbers to show why we’re excited for the future:
- We have over 510 registered users (covering more than 360 unique organizations), roughly split half-half between Buyers and Sellers.
- We have over 1,300 unique Listings on the marketplace, accounting for almost 8,500 hours of content.
- We’ve had 20 offers already, some of which are looking promising to close soon.
Given we started from zero in September, we’ve had wonderful growth and activity in such a short period (with Christmas and New Year in the way too!). We also didn’t start marketing until October essentially giving us just 3 months of actual presence in the market.
Our Product Development Cycle
Since our soft-launch, we’ve deployed 7 major updates every 2–3 weeks. Since we’re an agile shop, we aim to release new functionality frequently. We constantly reassess our roadmap and re-prioritize features as needed. As our user base grows, we are able to tap into more sources of feedback, allowing us to make the platform better for all.
Recent Platform Enhancements
I plan to write one of these posts every month or so to announce key feature updates released in the past month. Let’s get into some of the recent updates this time around…
SMS Notifications and Notification Center
In the past, the system sends email notifications to relevant parties when a user sends an enquiry or creates an offer. New this month, we have now introduced SMS notifications as well.
Users can, of course, toggle on and off email and sms notifications for the different types the platform sends in the new Notification Center.
You can read more about this over at the Help Center.
Searching and Filtering Listings Improvements
Joining our growing list of fields one can filter against is Country of Origin. This brings the current list of filterable fields to:
- Type (Film, TV Series, TV Special/Show, Web Series, etc.)
- Release Year (grouped by 5-year groups)
- Runtime (grouped by under 30m, 30m-60m and greater than 60m)
- Format Profiles (SD, HD, 4K, 8K)
- Genres
- Target Demographics (Gender and Age groups)
- Languages (split across Original Audio Languages, Dubbing Languages and Subtitle Languages)
- Countries of Origin
Together with free-text search covering titles, synopses, cast, and crew, etc., Vuulr offers powerful discovery capabilities for Buyers to find content for their unique audiences, faster and more efficiently.
You can read more about searching and filtering Listings over at the Help Center.
We’re excited for some of the new discovery functionality we’re planning for in the future. Stay tuned…
Viewing Related Listings by Field
Interested to view related listings by Seller, or Genre, or Country of Origin? We now have a feature where many of the fields shown in the Listing’s information page are clickable, opening a new window with a targeted search.
The fields that are clickable include Seller, Year of Release, Genres, Format Profiles, Languages, and Countries of Origin.
This should help Buyers find similar/related Listings according to their unique criteria.
You can read more about Filtering by Field over at the Help Center.
Ability to Clone Listings
Sellers can now clone Listings to create similar Listings (useful for Film sequels or subsequent seasons of a TV Series) without having to retype all MetaData. Of course, these fields in the cloned Listing are editable as needed.
You can read more about Cloning Listings over at the Help Center.
Resurrecting Rejected Offers
Buyers and Sellers can now “resurrect” a Rejected Offer. This is useful if the offer was accidentally rejected, or if the original offer details did not meet the expectations of the Seller (or Buyer in the case of a Counter Offer). The Buyer (or Seller) can resurrect and submit different terms.
You can read more about Resurrecting Offers over at the Help Center.
Right to Left Languages Now Supported
We now render RTL languages (i.e. from right to left), supporting the following languages:
- Arabic
- Aramaic
- Dhivehi/Maldivian
- Hebrew
- Kurdish (Sorani)
- Persian/Farsi
- Urdu
We’ve been getting a lot of Arabic content recently and this new feature should improve the experience of our Arabic (and other RTL Language) readers’ experience.
What about the Blockchain?
I’m excited to announce that we’ve made incredible progress on our Blockchain initiatives since our IMDA contest win that we announced back in November. I’ll be publishing an article soon to talk about that.
Final Thoughts
As I alluded to earlier, the whole team at Vuulr are extremely encouraged with how adoption of the platform has evolved in the last few months and we all remain 100% committed to making Vuulr a success.
As always, we welcome feedback. Send us a note at info@vuulr.com or find us on social at one of the following links:
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.