Made for TV

Apple TV | Roku | Android TV

Building for TV has unique challenges. We worked with our partners to test and vet early prototypes. We found out very early that TV user is much more passive. Passive users need intelligent apps to keep the right content coming with very little engagement or interaction.

Design Principles

Design an information structure that makes it fast and easy to get to content. People want to access content quickly, using the fewest number of taps, clicks, and swipes. Simplify your information structure and organize it in a way that requires a minimum number of screens.

UX Principles

The user only has to press one button and we will do our best with our clients to take care of the rest. Our partners would like to have an hourly state of news update delivered to the TV apps via a feed. If a user comes in and just lets the app play, this is the ideal content flow.

Advertising

As always our partners are paid through advertising. Pacing advertising on tv is important. We recommend a decelerating mid roll ad model for TV. As you users set the remote down and start consuming content passively, we dial down the ad frequency.

Apple TV

Here is the flow for the tvOS app. It shares core user experiences with other apps in our platform but will feel natural to tvOS users.

Roku

Roku had some serious limitations if you stay within their SDK. From a development standpoint, we had to build completely custom UI that felt very consistent to Roku OS.