FireTV + Olympics
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Category:
Sports + Streaming
Company:
NBCU
Duration:
2 Years
Location:
New York, NY
Date:
May 21, 2024
How do you find one live event in a sea of sport, using a TV remote?
NBCUniversal's streaming apps had to work everywhere people watch: phones, web, connected TVs, and game consoles. On the TV, that means a screen across the room, a remote with a handful of buttons, and on Fire TV, a voice assistant. The Olympics pushed all of it at once: live events across dozens of sports, played in a time zone half a day ahead of US viewers. I led information architecture and design for the flagship streaming apps, and Fire TV during the Games was the hardest test.
Structure before screens
I started with the information architecture: how live, upcoming, and replay content should be organized so a viewer can reach the event they care about in a few presses of the D-pad. On a TV, every level of hierarchy is another row to scroll and another button to press, so the structure had to be shallow, predictable, and consistent across devices, with the TV getting the simplest version of it.
Design from couch to moible and voice
From there I designed the 10-foot experience: focus states that read from across the room, rows that put what's live first, and spoiler-safe paths for events a viewer hasn't watched yet. I also designed voice interactions for Alexa-enabled devices, so a viewer could ask for an event instead of scrolling to find it.
+300% time in app on connected devices
Time in app on connected devices rose 300%. The architecture was built to carry both the flood of live events during the Games and the everyday catalog around them.
These features were a breakthrough for a 100 year old legacy media company. They have now been developed into the foundation of the flagship product, Peacock.
