Service
TCS Interactive
Humanizing Technology to Create Iconic Experiences
HIGHLIGHTS
- British broadcaster ITV enlisted TCS to design its new ITVX streaming service that offers free content with ads and ad-free content with a paid subscription, all in one place.
- TCS Interactive’s expertise in designing experiences and apps for television was key to designing a service that connects viewers to the content they love while also creating a destination for discovering new and fresh content.
- Developed in less than a year, ITVX has delivered more than 2.7 billion streams in its first year and has set a new standard for streaming services in the UK market.
Introduction
UK’s first integrated advertising and streaming platform
In September 2023, British broadcaster ITV accomplished a first-of-its-kind feat. One of its reporters became the first person to do a weather forecast atop the London Eye, 135 meters up in the air. The achievement was not only daring, but also imaginative and altogether in line with ITV’s purpose: to use the power of creativity to connect with people and make content people can’t get enough of.
ITV’s purpose is also the impetus behind another first: ITVX, the United Kingdom’s first integrated advertising and subscription streaming platform, offering free content with ads and ad-free content with a paid subscription, all in one place. Remarkably, the service took less than a year to develop and launch; ITVX went live during the 2022 FIFA World Cup, giving tens of millions of viewers an integrated, first-rate user experience from the start.
TCS was ITV’s partner of choice to design this first-of-its-kind service in the United Kingdom. The partnership, built on a shared mission and common objectives, was what made ITVX possible in what Deep Bagchee, ITV’s chief product officer, acknowledged was a “really short and tight timeline from the moment we conceptualized this product.”
“TCS Interactive really understands what good collaboration is all about, and we had real harmony between our teams. That's the only way you can get such a challenging project done in such little time,” said Bagchee.
Opportunity
A streaming service that’s fit for purpose
ITV is one of Britain’s biggest television broadcasters. Prior to the launch of ITVX, the broadcaster had a simple but effective catch-up TV service, ITV Hub, and BritBox, a subscription service. As the market matured and demand for streaming was growing exponentially, the time was right to merge the two services into a single, scaled-up content destination that gives ITV the flexibility to offer free and paid content so it can widen its appeal and increase revenue across subscriptions, ads, and sponsorships.
“We wanted to create a new streaming-first proposition that was really fit for purpose for this new streaming age,” said Bagchee.
ITVX is a cross-platform entertainment destination of connected TV products, the web, and mobile apps. It was designed with an integrated system of components and user experience (UX) deliver consistency and let viewers pick up where they left off, no matter the device.
Solution
A unified, balanced, and personalized service
From the start, TCS’ digital services business, TCS Interactive, worked to ensure that the viewer experience would be maximized during each engagement. Using UX design patterns, TCS Interactive created interaction points for customers that would make it easier for them to find the content they wanted. ITV wanted to dramatically increase its content catalog from 1,500 hours to well over 15,000 hours, and it was important to make sure that all this content, both live and video on demand (VOD), was showcased in a way that was easy to discover and watch.
“We really wanted to strike a balance between the curation of thousands of hours of content and personalization,” said Bagchee. So, a design began to coalesce around the idea of rails of content that were editorially curated but created in a way that viewers could easily find preferred content or content that they’d already started consuming. The key: connecting viewers to the content they love while also creating a destination for discovering new and fresh content.
The home page features free, ad-supported live and video content, along with VOD. A Live tab lets customers see all of ITV’s live content, as well as 12-13 themed live channels that focus on a single show or theme and are supported by ads. The tab also includes a familiar programming guide.
Taking its cue from the newly developed ITVX brand, a cross-functional team of ITV and TCS Interactive associates worked together to create an impactful visual design. The X is a distinguishing symbol not only in the logo but also as part of an immersive graphic flashing on the screen, and a striking color palette and standout design language capture the viewer’s attention and help amplify the brand.
“There are all these things we have to do as a public service broadcaster—age-gating within our product, providing subtitles, providing news and local content, and we had to make sure we got all these bits right within this short period of time,” recalled Bagchee.
TCS Interactive brought the right amount of pragmatism to the project to meet ITV’s business requirements, and the design acumen to push boundaries.
“One of the best things in working with TCS Interactive is the fact that they’d done the 10-foot experience (of television). They had designed television apps, which is really a unique space that requires slightly different thinking than designing a web page or a mobile app,” said Bagchee.
Outcome
A great user experience
Just four months after going live, ITVX had delivered one billion streams and more than 2.7 billion one year later. Today, the service has over 40 million registered users. Moreover, 88% of viewers who watch a premier go on to watch other content, and 216 of ITVX’s programs have been watched by a million viewers or more.
“We are now, both in terms of our monthly active users as well as our streaming hours, up massively from where we were with ITV Hub,” Bagchee confirmed. “In terms of both our digital revenue as well user engagement, people are watching more content, coming back more often, and watching for longer, which is really what this project was about.”
There are more than just numbers to support ITVX’s success. ITV did a lot of qualitative research, speaking to customers to get their feedback. Overwhelmingly, people said it’s a great user experience that is very different than what they’d seen from ITV before.
“With ITVX, we reinvented ITV for the streaming age,” said Bagchee. “Now I'm sure all of the competition will be trying to catch up.”
