FX Digital collaborated with the Discovery team to build the Discovery+ app for the US market. The service currently boasts over 18 million subscribers.
Discovery+ is Discovery’s new standalone, premium streaming platform, bringing together content from Discovery’s most popular TV entertainment channels, including HGTV, Food Network, TLC, Animal Planet and others. Discovery+ has gained an impressive 18 million subscribers since launch in early 2021.
FX Digital worked with the discovery+ team to support the development of their new US connected TV application. Our OTT and CTV developers provided their expertise across two platforms – Samsung Smart TV and Xbox One. discovery+ launched in early 2021 with an impressive media library featuring more than 55,000 episodes of television.
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Our team worked with Discovery to develop a feature-rich, web-based TV application launched across Connected TV and Xbox gaming console. Developing an optimised Javascript application that integrates with the native functionality of the aforementioned vendor platforms, we were able to create a high performance application to provide discovery+ customers with a premium quality OTT experience to rival other top global streaming services.
The discovery+ application is the largest TV application – both in terms of audience and amount of content – that FX Digital has helped develop. We helped to ensure the app provides a seamless and high quality user experience for discovery+ customers, as well as delivering the functionality required by the Discovery team, including DRM (launching soon), ad insertion, video player development and key UX/UI elements. Due to the huge catalogue of content available on the application, we had to think carefully about the UI to ensure that the user can easily navigate and search the content they want to watch, when they want to watch it.
The discovery+ OTT app adheres to the Web Accessibility Initiative, to ensure that the app is digitally inclusive and provides a fully accessible and optimised user experience. This means the app is accessible to users with visual impairments, including features such as voice over and text-to-speech. The FX Digital Quality Assurance team worked with the team at Discovery to provide rigorous quality assurance testing to optimise functionality and provide the best possible experience for discovery+ customers.
Ultimately, using the discovery+ design brief, we contributed to the creation of the US discovery+ app across Samsung and Xbox, providing a robust and reliable TV application experience. The app passed vendor testing across all vendors and has launched successfully across these platforms in the US, boasting over 15 million streaming subscribers as of April 2021.
