A TV app can't please everyone. What one person sees as a perfectly organized home screen, another might find empty. Every decision in this regard involves balancing technology, capabilities, and personal taste.
An evening of TV begins with a decision: watch it live, keep watching something else, pull up an old episode from the replay, or resume a recording. Behind every decision lies a need. How quickly that need is met depends on decisions made long before in UX design: what options are available, how many steps they require, and what appears first.
Different Viewers, Different Approaches
If you know exactly what you want, take the direct route. The search function finds shows and channels. If you know the channel, go to the Home screen via the channel selection or go straight to the player.
Anyone who wants to see what’s on right now is the classic live viewer. For them, there’s “Now on TV,” available as a section on the Home screen and as a separate view for the current programming. In the player, they can use the Quick Zapper. And anyone who knows their channel number by heart can just type it in directly.
If you want to pick up where you left off, use the bookmark. It saves your place not only during replays but also during recordings. On the Home screen, “Continue Watching” takes you right back to that spot.
If you just want to browse, you don't have a specific goal—and you don't need one. Home offers suggestions. The Replay Gallery features curated highlights from primetime or can be filtered by genre. In the TV Guide, you'll find everything—both upcoming and past programming.
These four types are a simplification. No one fits exclusively into just one of them, and other factors come into play: Age influences how naturally someone uses a remote control with many buttons. Background helps determine which channels are sought out and in which language. Technical knowledge determines whether features such as bookmarks or filters are even discovered.
Differences Between Devices and Their Pitfalls
Netstream TV currently runs on Android TV, tvOS, iOS, Android mobile, and in the browser. Since operating systems and devices have different controls, an "exact replica" is rarely possible or practical.
The remote control illustrates this most clearly. Android TV comes with a full-featured remote, complete with a number pad and everything. The Apple version gets by with just a few controls. As a result, direct channel selection using numbers is only available on remotes that have number pads.
On cell phones and tablets, you type directly with your finger; on the web, you can use a mouse. This gives you more flexibility than a simple remote control.
What we're working on to further improve search results
We are currently building a new recommendation engine so that viewers can find similar content more quickly and receive recommendations tailored to their viewing behavior.
Added to this is the personalization of Home. You can already customize your home page in the browser, and other apps will follow suit. Also planned are “Tonight” as a separate section on the TV, “Continue Watching” in the browser and on your phone, thumbnails when fast-forwarding, and the Mini Guide on the TV. You can find all the details about the upcoming features in our roadmap.
Our Promise
Nothing pleases everyone. But every day, we do our best to provide an experience tailored to each user's behavior.
The easiest way is to see for yourself: Request a test account and click through.
