Redesigning Red Bull TV to Unlock B2B Potential

Red Bull Media House owns two TV apps

Red Bull TV is a free, ad-free, and in-app purchase-free streaming service that offers live events, on-demand content, and original programming series.

ServusTV is Austria's largest private broadcaster, offering a variety of content on its streaming platform, ServusTV On.

Why the business invested in a redesign of both products

Expensive to maintain

Red Bull TV & ServusTV On are costly and inefficient to maintain due to years of technical debt and inconsistent technical approaches.

Goal: Reduce operating costs and technical complexity by designing one unified platform

Not directly profitable

Red Bull aims to keep Red Bull TV free for consumers, which makes these high operating costs more challenging to offset.

Goal: Increase earning potential through B2B partnerships (new tenants)

User insights

"I don't know if this is a film or a show"

Top results don't indicate whether each item is a film, show, episode, or event. In this example, do you know which item is which? The actual results don't always align with user expectations due to backend issues with results boosting. The UI format doesn't help either.

"Event information all looks the same"

Notice how the titles and subtitles are all the same. The dates in the badges are not in chronological order because the backend does not use 'recency' as a boosting attribute. Users struggle determining which event is which at a glance.

"How do I exit the player?"

The custom player controls and focus interactions are unfamiliar and different than industry standard, which confuses users when trying to do basic actions like scrubbing or exiting the player with their remote.

Our solution

Improved search experience

We improved the full search experience across all devices by including more relevant metadata and layouts. Recency boosting was implemented, and visual display of information was re-configured based on user feedback.

Clear event information

Location was a key indicator for users, so we added that field. Badges now show relative date and time to reduce cognitive overload. Results recency has been fixed. Redundant subtitle fields were removed.

Native player controls

The player experience is now consistent with behaviors users are already familiar with, reducing the learning curve. Native player controls also support accessibility and localization out-of-the-box, and benefit from regular updates and bug fixes provided by the OS. This reduces cost of design and engineering maintenance.

Multi-brand design system

We built a new design system from scratch which could support multiple brands and breakpoints with the click of a button. Engineering was able to quickly reskin and map separate databases to our design. With such velocity, we were able to make a deal with a new tenant.

Final designs

Outcomes

The business secured 1 new tenant just 1 month after publicly launching. This B2B deal was enabled by our new multi-tenant design solution.

Engineering teams are able to pivot and scale faster.

Design is able to produce re-skinned screens in 1 click, enabled by a multi-tenant design system we built from scratch using variables and modes.

We designed and launched a Vision Pro app in 2 months, enabled by our new infrastructure. Apple featured us as part of WWDC24.

Want to see more details? Full PDF available upon request.