Video: How Can App Developers Create Strong Experiences While Keeping Costs Down?
Today's OTT platform developers face a host of challenges in creating strong and distinct experiences on limited budgets, and attempting to serve an multi-platform audience fast approaching UX fatigue, as Plex CEO Keith Valory and VICE Media VP Product Drake Martinet discuss in this clip from Streaming Media East 2017.
Learn more about OTT platforms at Streaming Media West.
Read the transcript of this clip:
Keith Valory: What are the challenges you see in developing good, strong apps across the board for lots of platforms? How do you kind of help the user? How do you kind of help them adopt your framework and your user experience knowing that they're adopting a bunch of others as well?
Drake Martinet: The decision, for me, is made in two distinct buckets. One is economic and one is user experience-focused. The economic argument is just as hard as the user experience argument. The economic argument is, how could we effectively and efficiently bring an experience to this platform, have it be an experience that we're proud of? Whether it's something we spend all our time on, or is a portion of that. How can we architect our sales and systems in a way to make that possible and keep our costs low? Those are business considerations of product. For some of them, the answers are clear, for some, less clear.
I think that, for instance, we at VICE invested a lot in a core API architecture and a video serving architecture that allows us to spin upfront in experiences much less expensively than others, maybe. That helps us have options. That's a business decision that affects what we might be able to offer people.
On the user experience end, it's a hydra of problems. Every platform, multiple different norms. Again, getting back to the user, what a user expects from your brand on Roku, given the Roku environment is different, should be different because you want to serve that user in that place.
I have it easy. VICE, forever, has been a visually distinct brand and is a strong brand presence that's built on strong visuals and strong content visuals. That leads for us. That means that the way we take our images, our show posters, the things that we can carry and serve, regardless if we're not designing the user interface, you look at that stuff and you don't mistake that it's VICE. It's certainly VICE content if it's in there.
That's makes my job easier on that end. It means if we show up in Roku, you know it's our content. Then when it's a first-party thing, yeah, we work very hard to make sure brand's consistent across user experiences. The mantra internally is, "All of our users across any of our passion points, you have to learn how to use VICE once. Even if they are going to traverse on multiple brands." Some days we win, some days we don't, but that's how we think about it.
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