Inside Spotify's Project Magneto, its failed multiyear effort to create Spotify TV, a highly personalized video streaming service, and the hardware to run it
Context & Ripple Effects
Project Magneto was the deepest attempt yet at a plan Spotify had been signaling since its 2015 push to apply its music playbook to video: an owned, highly personalized video service running on Spotify's own hardware. The company even bought recommendation startup MightyTV in 2017 to sharpen that personalization (shuttering the product but keeping founder Brian Adams as VP of technology).
By mid-2019 both the service and the device were dead — original video content headlined the list of initiatives Spotify has since abandoned. The throughline matters because Spotify has kept returning to video on different terms: talks about full-length music videos in 2023 and seven-figure offers to lure video-oriented creators away from YouTube in 2024.
First-order effects
- Spotify's engineers and capital committed to building a personalized video platform and companion hardware are redirected to the core audio business, and any partner content lined up for Spotify TV loses its intended destination.
Second-order effects
- With an owned service off the table, Spotify's fallback is renting attention instead of owning it — paying video-oriented creators seven figures to distribute alongside YouTube, and pushing partners to add full-length music videos inside the existing app.
Third-order effects
- If the cycle holds, Spotify's video strategy settles structurally into distribution and curation layered over others' production, with personalization assets like MightyTV feeding recommendations rather than powering a competing streaming service.
The trend: Spotify keeps cycling through build-own-abandon attempts at video, each retreat pushing it further toward partnership-based video distribution rather than an owned platform.