The Concept

A thousand salsa videos in your pocket. Anywhere.

What started as a weekly video podcast, became the inflection point for the way the latin entertainment industry taught dance lessons worldwide. Addicted2Salsa is an entertainment brand that specializes in making it accessible for customers to learn salsa dance through its 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, which would prove to be an industry shifter.

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 be impractical as it would create an excessively large app size that would not fit into an 8 GB iPhone. Additionally, Apple restricted users from downloading mobile applications over the cellular network that exceeded a certain size limit, 20 MBs at the time. Exceeding this limit would have confined the product's virality since users would be unable to download the app at nightclubs due to lack of WiFi availability.

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 would also support terabyte-volumes of performant video content delivery, allowing millions of users worldwide to seamlessly enjoy watching the media without interruption.