Culture on demand across 10K+ files

Building a Boutique Streaming Platform with DatoCMS

Beletrina Digital is not your average streaming platform, nor is it another clone. It blends highly curated collections of e-books, audiobooks, films, podcasts, and longform editorial content into one focused space. Instead of throwing everything into a catalog and letting users scroll endlessly, it guides them. Every recommendation, every playlist, every article is intentionally and meticulously chosen.

The result feels like a digital cultural magazine, but with full multimedia capabilities. And at the core of the editorial workflow sits DatoCMS.

Trampolin, the agency behind the build, created a decoupled platform that lets editors and developers work independently.

Editors use modular content blocks in DatoCMS to manage and publish new material, while media delivery, subscriptions, and streaming are handled by a separate backend. The frontend is built with Nuxt, user auth is powered by Supabase, and DatoCMS acts as the content layer tying everything together.

What makes this project effective is not flashy design or overwhelming content volume. It’s the simplicity of the user experience paired with the flexibility of the underlying tech.

DatoCMS provides the structure, the speed, and the editorial freedom needed to publish fast without cutting corners. It fits into a modern stack without forcing compromises or adding weight.

The result is a platform that feels more like a cultural journal than a tech product. And that’s exactly the point Trampolin set out to make with this project.

Built for Editors

Beletrina Digital publishes around five complex articles every week. These aren’t quick posts. Each one includes long sections of text, embedded videos, images, and metadata.

The team needed a CMS that was flexible enough to handle mixed formats, but intuitive enough for non-developers to use daily. According to Rok Klemenčič, art director and design lead on the project, DatoCMS was the right choice.

Working with DatoCMS with its clean user interface is simple and user friendly. Having a set of predefined modular blocks is a piece of cake for the editors to build new pages.

Editors build entire pages using modular blocks, each designed to handle a specific type of content. Layouts can be rearranged without touching code, thanks to visual drag-and-drop controls.

Reorganizing the menu structure with drag and drop is easy to reposition sections on a page, all without any help from developers.

Navigation and menu structures can be adjusted in seconds. There’s no reliance on developers for basic updates, which means content moves faster.

Streaming as Structured Content

While DatoCMS powers the editorial layer, the media itself lives in a dedicated backend system. That backend handles subscriptions, paywalls, access control, and HD media streaming.

To bridge the two systems, Trampolin built a custom DatoCMS plugin. Editors can browse available media directly from the backend, then select which items to feature in their articles or collections. Each selected media item pulls in all the associated metadata and preview assets automatically, avoiding double entries or errors.

This makes the editorial process more efficient and far less error-prone. Editors work in one place, and the connection between content and media stays clean.

Scaling to B2B

Beyond its main site, Beletrina Digital also powers custom portals for B2B clients, which are often companies or public institutions that want to give employees or patients access to curated cultural content.

One hospital in Slovenia, for example, runs two different versions of the platform. One targets general staff. The other is specifically purpose-built for the pediatrics department. Both share the same backend infrastructure and sync with the core CMS instance, but each is highly customized locally on the UI.

When a new article is published on the main platform, it gets pushed to all sub-sites automatically. Editors at each portal can then tailor the selection or override content as needed. This setup would be painful to manage manually in most CMSs. With DatoCMS and structured content models, however, it just works.