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Quality and experience the keys for UKTV success as it strikes Virgin deal
Editor
| 20 June 2016
As it announced a major content deal with the UK’s leading cable company Virgin Media, UKTV has cited a focus on quality and user experience of apps and website as the principal aspects for encouraging higher engagement and repeat usage.
UKTV 20 JUne 2016On 15 June the entertainment company unveiled the first major revamp of its fast-growing UKTV Play on-demand TV product. The updated service is designed to make viewers’ experience more enjoyable and personalised, based on A/B testing, and the new look features what the company says is a more focused approach to finding favourite programmes through a better organised homepage, higher quality programme images and the introduction of easy-to-view genre listings. In addition, the new programme guide is said to make it easy to find on-demand programmes from the TV schedules.
UKTV Play has now launched on PCs, complementing the company’s support for direct to consumer products on iOS, Android, YouView and Fire TV with other platforms following over the summer of 2016.
Speaking exclusively to Rapid TV News, Oliver Davies, UKTV head of digital products, who led the re-design, revealed that the company is seeing steady and impressive growth across all devices in usage, engagement and app installs, hitting the one million app installs milestone.
Growth, Davies said, was fuelled by a number of factors. “First and foremost our content offering must be compelling and timely – our exclusive previews of brand new Taskmaster and Storage Hunters UK currently on UKTV Play, for example, are a really strong pull for Dave viewers. “Another factor is the effectiveness of our innovative press and marketing campaigns and social media presence, and the current initiatives really show off our passion and ambitions for UKTV Play. And finally, our focus on the quality and user experience of our apps and website, which is crucial to encouraging higher engagement and repeat usage. We’ve carried out extensive A/B testing to ensure we’re delivering TV in a way that our users love.”
Davies added that the company was ‘hard at work’ developing brand new apps for a range of consumer devices, and is planning some major new launches for the second half of 2016. “There are also a lot of improvements we’re working on under the hood that will further improve the user experience, discoverability and UI across our existing apps. And that’s just 2016: we have some exciting plans for 2017 and beyond that we’re not quite ready to reveal yet,” he concluded
UKTV’s deal with Virgin Media gives the cableco’s customers access to more UKTV shows than on any other pay-TV platform in the UK or Ireland. Subscribers will have access to more than 10,000 hours of catch-up and box-set content across a range of UKTV Originals, US and UK acquisitions plus and content from the BBC, ITV and Channel 4.
The deal also includes the launch of the updated UKTV Play app on Virgin Media’s TiVo platform, allowing Virgin Media customers to watch a wealth of catch-up and box-set titles from UKTV’s free-to-air channels Dave, Drama, Yesterday and Really.
Editor
| 20 June 2016
As it announced a major content deal with the UK’s leading cable company Virgin Media, UKTV has cited a focus on quality and user experience of apps and website as the principal aspects for encouraging higher engagement and repeat usage.
UKTV 20 JUne 2016On 15 June the entertainment company unveiled the first major revamp of its fast-growing UKTV Play on-demand TV product. The updated service is designed to make viewers’ experience more enjoyable and personalised, based on A/B testing, and the new look features what the company says is a more focused approach to finding favourite programmes through a better organised homepage, higher quality programme images and the introduction of easy-to-view genre listings. In addition, the new programme guide is said to make it easy to find on-demand programmes from the TV schedules.
UKTV Play has now launched on PCs, complementing the company’s support for direct to consumer products on iOS, Android, YouView and Fire TV with other platforms following over the summer of 2016.
Speaking exclusively to Rapid TV News, Oliver Davies, UKTV head of digital products, who led the re-design, revealed that the company is seeing steady and impressive growth across all devices in usage, engagement and app installs, hitting the one million app installs milestone.
Growth, Davies said, was fuelled by a number of factors. “First and foremost our content offering must be compelling and timely – our exclusive previews of brand new Taskmaster and Storage Hunters UK currently on UKTV Play, for example, are a really strong pull for Dave viewers. “Another factor is the effectiveness of our innovative press and marketing campaigns and social media presence, and the current initiatives really show off our passion and ambitions for UKTV Play. And finally, our focus on the quality and user experience of our apps and website, which is crucial to encouraging higher engagement and repeat usage. We’ve carried out extensive A/B testing to ensure we’re delivering TV in a way that our users love.”
Davies added that the company was ‘hard at work’ developing brand new apps for a range of consumer devices, and is planning some major new launches for the second half of 2016. “There are also a lot of improvements we’re working on under the hood that will further improve the user experience, discoverability and UI across our existing apps. And that’s just 2016: we have some exciting plans for 2017 and beyond that we’re not quite ready to reveal yet,” he concluded
UKTV’s deal with Virgin Media gives the cableco’s customers access to more UKTV shows than on any other pay-TV platform in the UK or Ireland. Subscribers will have access to more than 10,000 hours of catch-up and box-set content across a range of UKTV Originals, US and UK acquisitions plus and content from the BBC, ITV and Channel 4.
The deal also includes the launch of the updated UKTV Play app on Virgin Media’s TiVo platform, allowing Virgin Media customers to watch a wealth of catch-up and box-set titles from UKTV’s free-to-air channels Dave, Drama, Yesterday and Really.
