what to Watch & Universal save list

Most (98%) of viewing sessions on Roku begin with the user moving right and launching their favorite streaming app. While this is perfectly functional, it meant that Roku’s OS features were largely an afterthought. Rough estimates were that a streaming hour from the App grid would generate about $0.10 (mostly due to the banner Ad), vs a visit the left nav which which generates $0.25. 

As a business we wanted to organically increase usage of “Roku Owned” experiences such as the OS Left nav. What to Watch provides a set of tools to pull content from all the streaming services you use into a Universal Save List, Continue Watching, and rows of recommended content. 

Background Research

Our user research team had already established several “critical user journeys”, three of which were considered candidates for our new page: 

  • “I’d like to pick up my show where I left off” (i.e. Continue Watching) 

  • “I’d like to keep track of things I might want to watch” (i.e. Save List) 

  • “I’d like to find something new” (i.e. browsing) 

Roku was in a unique position to cut across the bewildering variety of streaming apps and provide a unified experience that aggregated content from all the services the user was entitled to.

Layout

I was tasked with quickly creating a Home Screen Menu item to demonstrate how our OS could be more useful. Being familiar with what our UI system could easily accomplish, I used all existing UI components to design and launch What to Watch. This provided fertile ground for the ML team to populate rows and start testing the effects of row ordering, personalization, etc.

  1. Popular free and from your subscriptions - ML generated recs from across all services the user is entitled to. This rowquickly establishes the cross-service nature of the page and contain the highest probability of recommendations for that user. 

  2. Genre Browsing - Top level categories establish th eReusable visual style lends itself to being programmatically generated. 

  3. User Utility Rows

    1. Aggregated Continue Watching feeds from participating partners means the user doesn’t have to remember which service has their content anymore.

    2. Platform Save List provides updates on the user’s favorite content as it moves from one service to another.

  4. Anchor Rows - Follow the pattern for anchor rows in use in TRC.

  5. Roku Verticals - Rows to help draw users to high value Roku content such as Live News and Sports, Free, Music, Kids content, and Roku Originals

  6. Genre Rows - Free/subbed content from Genre collections, aggregated across partners 

  7. Unlocked Episodes - Providers would often make the first few episodes of a show free to entice the user to subscribe.

  8. SVOD Upsells - Once the user has exhausted browsing options, they may be receptive to an opportunity to purchase new ones.

Universal Save List 

A “Watch List” is a mundane, almost perfunctory feature in most streaming apps, but the Roku Universal Save List is different. As a platform that indexes content from dozens of streaming apps, Roku has a unique view of content moving from one service to another. The Universal Save List allows users to save content from any app, enabling a number of desirable use cases:

  • Checking availability of shows as they become available free / via their subscriptions.

  • Following favorite shows and movies as different streaming services trade the rights to them (e.g. “What will I do when The Office leaves Netflix?”).

  • Seeding our recommendations algorithm.

For years the Universal Save List had been one of the most requested new features for the Roku OS. It took a skilled articulation of the

Press

Roku OS 11.5 boosts “continue watching” and “save list” features

Roku’s latest update adds universal save list and ‘continue watching’ feature