5 Year Anniversary - HMV Mania

HMV Mania has reached its 5 year anniversary as of today, May 23rd 2026! 🎉

Catalog

On May 23rd, 2021 the site went online. We’re at over 6,000 videos onsite now with over 1,000 creators. Although a release rate of 4-5 videos per day might seem relatively small, over a year that’s around 1,500 new videos a year.

A New Vision

The Mission Statement has helped guide this site the past five years. There’s also been a handy HMV Makers List and Tutorials for making HMVs.

While things have been stable and consistent, we’ve wanted to introduce new features. The biggest roadblock is putting them on old architecture, so we have plans for a new site concept to see how feasible it is to have a site re-design to incorporate what a lot of users have been wanting.

Back in 2023, we did have a concept for a new prototype site “HMV Mania Tools” to make it easier to navigate videos on the main site. There were a few demos posted on the Twitter account, although we ultimately decided that it’s better just to have an entirely new site rather than a separate utility site.

Since then, the site has mainly been running like an old yet reliable car. If we want to have more features, we’ll need a different architecture.

So What Now?

HMV Mania will still continue running with the consistent release time of 10 PM GMT With 4-5 releases per day on the current site architecture.

Although we have ideas for what a new site design could have, we need to have a blueprint for the site. As an example for what needs to be considered:
– How will user hierarchies work?
– How will data be related to each other without being overly complicated? (e.g. tags, series, creators)
– How will users be table to tag videos so making videos easier to search can be a combined/community effort?

The planning phase for the blueprint of the site will be a long process. If we can get it right at the start, we don’t need to retrofit ideas. This is a great opportunity to envision a new site from scratch, although it will require some serious thought as to how we can properly execute it in a way that will work long-term so we don’t have a situation like HMV Mania Tools from 2023.

We have seen users post suggestions about filters, tagging, playlists, etc. which will be considered when designing a new site concept.

Important Considerations

Even if we end up having a site prototype that allows us the features we want, there would need to be a migration plan to go over to the new site architecture after internal discussion with the backend dev. In other words, this will need to be handled in phases with updates over time.