Newin’s nPlayer multimedia app: A case study in adapting to users’ needs

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The Internet marketplace is littered with those that fell to the wayside because their creators failed to suss out users’ needs. The lessons left by MySpace, Friendster, Airtime, and Apple Maps show that to maintain relevancy, you must continue to evolve – or die.

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In fact, those that adapt to meet consumer demand are a rare find, well worth watching. Products like Newin’s nPlayer, a multimedia app apparently on track to be one such notable exception, have much to teach the rest.

It’s not exactly clear when or where the Korean-based company’s app picked up its colorful sobriquet as “the mother of all media players,” but according to user and critic reviews, it’s earned it.

Since its launch in mid-2013, the iOS app has developed a good reputation for being hassle-free in a number of ways. For one, it plays a long laundry list of audio and video formats and codecs, including many like MP4, AVI, WMV, and MKV which Apple devices frustratingly doesn’t support. Most importantly, it does this without requiring users to waste time converting the files first.

The nPlayer also supports numerous subtitle formats and allows for the quick alteration of caption font, color, size, and location. And it’s been noted for having excellent user interface, with well-tuned, easy-to-pick-up gesture controls that users can customize if they don’t find quite to their particular liking.

Many of these features have been added and refined over time via updates based on user feedback and requests.  And while streaming from local and external networks has always been a feature from the app’s inception, it continues to upgraded to meet evolving marketplace demands.

According to Newin, Inc. COO Aaron Kim, much work has gone into pre-solving streaming issues in order to keep users happy.

“These days, music and movies are higher quality files, which means their sizes translate into larger loads than the device storage can handle,” explains Kim.

“For this reason, people like to stream their files from cloud services or NAS devices. But depending on devices and services used, there are many different types of protocols and linkage ways each supports and users have difficulty finding the appropriate app for their device. nPlayer solves the problem by supporting many different types of protocols, cloud services and many other networks. It frees the burden of the device storage loads and enables many kinds of devices to stream big size files with high performance quality like you are playing local files.”

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This type of both proactive and reactive support is especially important for a multimedia player app, where problems can quickly scare consumers away.

“The performance capacity directly influences the product quality and users’ satisfaction,” Kim says. “When you watch a movie using a mobile application, if you experience frame drop or subtitle delay, would you continue watching the movie?”

Newin’s plans all stem from keeping close attention to its customers, notes Kim.

“We keep collecting the voices of each one of nPlayer’s users. Rather than just sticking to our development plan, we try to solve their problems and add the new features to compensate. In other words, nPlayer continues being completed by users since it released.”

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Solid advice and an example that many others in tech would do well to follow.

For more on the nPlayer, which will feature added support for the Android in the first quarter of 2015, visit Newin’s web-site.

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