TVO

Streaming Discoverability

TVO hosts a wide selection of documentaries and series however major issues impead its usability. While the content catalog is diverse, often titles don’t appear on the site and are hidden due to the sites indirect navigation and lack of organization. At the same time, the video experience is distracting with a cluttered interface that puts attention on everything except the content the user is watching.

Creating a more welcoming and cinematic experience

66% of People people we interviewed identified that they had hard time knowing what TVO does and don’t automatically think of TVO to watch Documentaries and series. At the same time, the respondents identified that they like binge watching shows, from platforms such as Netflix, Prime Video and Twitch. 

Part of our solution was to bring that same cinematic experience to TVO.org, promote greater content recall by using poster images of documentaries and series, showing the vast amount of content through carousels and curated blocks while introducing a more intuitive navigation system that gets users finding content faster and more. 

The old TVO.org experience. In order to view all documentaries, you had to click on the Browse All Documentaries and Series buttons. 

More clicks and cover images with little context meant more content was hidden that made it harder to discover and explore the diversity of our content

Organized Show Pages and Video Player

Show and video pages also received an update. In particular, we refreshed our DAM system, video player and added new features that we identified through surveys and respondents that fit into the theme of

People wanted to be able to view our series, current affairs content, and documentaries in the ways that worked them. Therefore, Playback speed, picture-in-picture and enhancing our Chromecast and Airplay capabilities were all identified as priority enhancements for our experience. 

Streamlined and Intuitive

With these fixes, we were able to significantly reduce the journey taken to view content and make a more straightforward experience for users so that they can enjoy content faster.

Future enhancements

Over time, we will be tracking performance of each section and analyzing our Google Analytics to see what percentage of our audience we can retain and attract. One of our next priorities is to enhance the performance of the section and enhance it so that page times will decrease, and show titles can appear faster and more frequently when users browse.

Since we are one of the few providers that offer transcripts, described and closed captioning within our video experience, I would love to find a way to see if we can improve and create a more unified version for our users. Accessibility features have definitely helped bring unexpected benefits to the traffic that we see, especially international, and it would be interesting what we can do to leverage that insight. 

Using Format