After shipping discovery+ and with fast follows locked and loaded, I focused on design innovation with the intent of informing the roadmap and near term decisions with a future perspective. I also explored emerging patterns to determine any potential fit for our product.
We’ve all heard of watch parties and co-viewing, but those experiences are less than practical, mired with technical hiccups and the schedule-defying impromptu nature of the sessions. What if you could have a sense of watching together with someone, but separately and on your own time? With Binge Buddies, you can see where your buddy is on a show you watch together and you and your buddy can leave reactions in the video timeline for one another.
See what else your binge buddies are watching to leverage their content discovery to your own benefit.
For synchronous shared viewing, I wanted to solve some of the barriers to making watch parties a challenge. My solution made it easy to invite others through a profile handshake process. It enables novel party features that are timed with the content. Watch parties can be scheduled or ad-hoc, and it should be easy to update the content or add/remove party members.
Another key innovation here is the interaction with a remote control to make engaging on the primary screen not only possible, but a fun and gratifying experience.
The party doesn’t have to end when the movie or show does. Your party can vote for what to watch next!
We were going to go to Colorado and I wanted to see if there were any Ghost Adventures locations or Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives restaurants that might be drivable. We ended up going to two Guy Fieri featured restaurants and a haunted gold mine where I caught a spirit orb on my iPhone! The trip inspired the following rough concepts around discovering locations and also later inspired a content metaverse invention disclosure.
Discover locations from episode options or arrow down from the timeline during playback to discover these.
The superfans exploration was about empowering fans of a show with added abilities that will benefit all users who arrive at that show. For example, you’ve heard about a show, but it’s not a serial drama where you have to start from the beginning. Where should youstart in that series? Knowing which episodes are fan favorites is crowd-sourced logic for Shuffle Play and an alternate sequencing of episodes that can be selected from the Details screen instead of a season.
Ultimately, the end of playback experience depends on the type of content and should factor-in the context in which the user arrived at the content. Different conditions apply as well, such as when you’ve reached the end of a series. Continuous Play is one of those things like video previews with audio in a streaming experience. It can be anxiety inducing if it goes against the user’s intent.
In response to customer complaints about freshness and knowing what’s new in the library, I explored a content discovery feed approach inspired by TikTok and other social apps that have mimicked it to see if it might be a good way to discover our content. The mobile experience is a given, but the connected TV experience was surprisingly lean back and effective.