Appstage

24i empowers businesses by launching and scaling their streaming services. Since joining 24i in 2018, the bigger part of my efforts have been going towards Appstage, their successful white-label video streaming solution. But to get to where they are now, many things had to happen.

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A changing landscape

After a decade of providing video streaming experiences, 24i needed to shift their strategy. Changes had been impacting the way users consume video; the TV had gotten competition from many other (handheld) devices and video would start to be consumed anywhere, at any part of the day. There was a need for a new video streaming solution that would offer a rapid time-to-market for streaming businesses while supporting that wide range of platforms. And so the vision for Appstage was born.

This new product gave me and my team the opportunity to drive its design strategy and build a new user experience from the ground up. We kicked this off with extensive user research, making sure we fully educated ourselves on our end-users and their needs. Afterwards, I started conceptualising the core product. With my product design team we defined the UX flows for the defined feature-set based on user stories and business objectives. Simultaneously we defined a clear vision for its visual identity. Involving stakeholders often and early on to validate our decisions made this an efficient process. The results of this phase gave us all the tools to create a high-fidelity product concept that impressed our stakeholders.

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This new product gave me and my team the opportunity to drive its design strategy and build a new user experience from the ground up.

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Core product

After iterating upon the concept until we were confident with the results, it was time to start designing and building the product. To design a streaming product on this scale, with a large number of functionalities on several platforms, we needed structure. An elaborate design system could provide us exactly that. And so I took charge on a new highly functional design system that included design and feature documentation, component libraries and developer guidance.

One especially complex problem was the white-label nature of the product. Adapting all mockups towards a specific customer was requiring big efforts. Eventually I figured out a way to provide the design system with the ability to switch out styleguides on the fly, applying it instantly on all mockups. This ended up saving the teams tons of hours in the years to come.

Constant iteration

With the design system up and running, we could focus on building out the product. Design and development worked together with a shared vision, within cross-functional teams. The core functionalities were designed and built bit by bit, until we reached a satisfying base product.

During its lifespan Appstage has evolved into a complete, customisable and feature-rich streaming solution that enables streaming services around the world to grow their business and amaze their audience. But we didn't get there without loads of hard work. As a team we worked on constantly improving our product, its user experience and the feature set. We aimed to make our customers happy, and their end users alike.

With Appstage, 24i directly benefited from its newly created product as it enabled them to deliver upon promises of exceptional time-to-market. The strong design system we delivered played a key aspect in achieving this. Next to that, Appstage was beating the market in terms of user experience. Customers highly appreciated our product design efforts, which led to happy end-users. The product feature-set was expanding rapidly to serve even more customer types.

With Appstage, 24i successfully onboarded many high-profile customers like Youfone, Vice, Post Luxembourg, Delta, BroadwayHD, Entel and more. With our new product and refined processes we were able to get customers up and running within a matter of weeks. Millions of happy video streaming end-users make Appstage the most successful product in 24i's line-up.