Development of an Android TV app for an International TV Everywhere Service Provider

Customer

The Customer is a European TV Everywhere company. Providing a wide range of video streaming solutions to network carriers, broadcasters, and content owners, the Customer serves such large entertainment and telecom industry players as Fox Entertainment Group, MTV, Discovery Communications, BBC, T-Mobile, and Orange.

Challenge

To expand their business, the Customer needed to develop a multiscreen app that allowed watching online streams on Android TV-powered TVs, Nexus Player, and NVidia Shield. They had a UI design and a detailed story map with different scenarios for multiple user personas, but didn’t have the competencies for the app’s implementation.

Solution

Working in accordance with the Customer’s strictly set requirements, ScienceSoft’s Android app developers used Waterfall methodology to carry out the project. The final app offers Live TV and video on demand (VOD)/streaming on demand (SVOD) services, supports electronic programming guide (EPG) and interactive programming guide (IPG). For digital rights management (DRM), PlayReady, Exoplayer, and Google Widevine are used.

The app also has the following features:

• Installation wizard and interactive user guide.
• Home screen with a grid list of available movies and TV shows.

When an item in the list is selected, a user can see the details including: synopsis, acting cast, director, year of release, ratings, trailers, and user score.

• Unregistered users’ view access.
• Registered user account and personalized data.

After logging in from their device, a user can access profile settings that include: password change option, saved payment method information, list of favorite movies/shows, bookmarked movies/shows, and watch/purchase/search history. Based on the favorite list and watch history, the app automatically creates personal recommendations that can be seen on the app’s home screen.

• Parental control mode.
• Multi-language support (10 languages).
• Possibility to choose from available audio and subtitle tracks.
• Comprehensive filtering/search options (by title, genre, acting cast, director, year, etc.)
• Help, FAQ, and Privacy Policy menus.

To ensure smooth and stable performance, ScienceSoft’s team implemented local data caching and optimized the app’s UI for earlier NVidia Shield models. Once the development was complete, our testing team performed comprehensive testing and made sure all services worked correctly.

Results

The developed Android TV app allowed the Customer to cater to a larger audience in the digital TV industry. Its release contributed to the Customer’s new business partnerships in the European Union and the US.

Technologies and Tools

Java, Kotlin, Android SDK, Leanback (UI customization), Crashlytics, Proguard, Multidex, ExoPlayer (SmoothStreaming with PlayReady DRM), Moshi, Logansqure, Glide, Butterknife, Dagger, Dualcache, Retrofit2, OkHttp3, RxJava2.