Media anywhere anytime
TVNZ+ and 1News mobile app development
TVNZ provides quality free-to-air content watched by millions of Kiwis every day. From international blockbusters to home-grown productions, these shows are streamed across many devices, both live and on demand.
TVNZ is one of our forever clients (10 years and counting!). Our core team of media experts have worked alongside them to build, maintain and continually enhance their video, on-demand and news services. Throughout this time, we’ve worked across multiple end-points and through many evolutions and rebrands leading to TVNZ+ and 1 News Now.
When asked to explain TVNZ+, our lead developer on the project for over 8 years, Peter Bent, put it simply: “It’s like Netflix, but free!”
From apps to Apple TV
With over two million people streaming TVNZ content through a range of technologies every day, our job is to ensure that experience is always seamless, whether it’s on a phone, tablet, web browser or TV using Chromecast, Android TV, or Apple TV.
More 3rd party doodads than true crime docos
Our devs are talented media specialists who prioritise top-quality performance for your viewing pleasure. But behind the scenes, it’s a complex production. Media streaming products are dependent on an elaborate architecture of third-party components - more than are required by most banking services!
Our team needs to do an enormous amount of proactive maintenance to keep on top of the life cycles of over 10 third-party platforms and SDKs - from media players to digital rights management. We stay across it all so that TVNZ don’t have to.
Built to last
By spending a percentage of our mahi every quarter on proactive maintenance and technical debt we’ve also ensured the longevity of the product - and significantly increased TVNZ’s ROI. Using modern libraries, monitoring framework updates, following existing standards and conventions, and regularly improving apps, means we’ve kept it up to date for close to a decade.
Up to the minute metrics
Using analytics to understand what’s going on is critical for the media sector. One small tweak to their programming can result in (hundreds of) thousands of dollars in advertising revenue! Our team use Segment and Nielsen media analytics platforms to provide TVNZ with valuable insights to inform their marketing decisions, and confirm viewer data for their advertisers. TVNZ also uses Split to experiment with every new feature.
The challenge of too much choice!
A good media streaming service offers a huge (and continually refreshing) choice of content. But to provide a great experience, it needs to be smart enough to surface the right content, in the right way to help you find your next binge-watch!
TVNZ+ constantly evolves both the user experience and the algorithms to keep Kiwis constantly entertained!
New, new, news app!
But it’s more than just the fun stuff. TVNZ's unique selling point is their ability to deliver high-quality video content - and that extends to the way they provide up-to-the-minute breaking news.
When they decided they wanted to manage the news experience on the app entirely from the backend, we designed and built a system that gave them that flexibility. This means the current 1News app is dynamically rendered based on instructions from the API which dictates the layout and features of each article, based on the prebuilt modular components.
There’s no business like show business
Over almost a decade we’ve supported TVNZ on their journey to digital maturity - and we’re still going strong. Since we built this product nine years ago, we have continually evolved it (in fact there probably isn’t a single code that’s still the same) to meet the changing demands of the media landscape and we’re excited to keep optimising it for the future.
You've made it easy for our team to understand what needs to be done, and to set priorities. You're taking that worry away from our guys.
Andrew Blakey
Development Manager, TVNZ