The Concept

A thousand salsa videos in your pocket. Anywhere.

What started as a weekly video podcast became an inflection point in how the Latin entertainment industry taught dance lessons worldwide. Addicted2Salsa is an entertainment brand that specializes in making salsa dance accessible through videos and online resources. The introduction of the iPhone in 2007 presented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to evolve from the original podcast format and create a unique on-demand mobile experience. Taking advantage of new digital technology innovations, Addicted2Salsa created a new library of entertainment content that helped shift the industry.

One of the key complexities at the time was that high-definition video consumed large amounts of disk space. Therefore, bundling all video content with the app would have been impractical because it would create an excessively large binary that would not fit on an 8 GB iPhone. Additionally, Apple restricted users from downloading mobile applications over cellular networks if they exceeded a certain size limit, which was 20 MB at the time. Exceeding this limit would have constrained product growth since users would be unable to download the app at nightclubs where Wi-Fi access was limited.

The proposal was to allow the application to dynamically and remotely update its content, allowing users to stream and download their preferred videos for offline availability, a novel concept for mobile apps at the time. This would allow the total binary app size to be within Apple's stipulation while at the same time reducing the requirement for mobile storage space.

To achieve the desired mobile video experience, we implemented cutting-edge techniques in a new serverless architecture. This system also supported terabyte-scale, high-performance video delivery, allowing millions of users worldwide to stream media seamlessly without interruption.