Jio-cinema's match viewing experience breakdown 🔥
exploring the app during the IPL finals
Well, this could be my appreciation post for the IPL finals, just because my favorite team wins. Could also be an appreciation post for Jio cinema.
Going back to covid times, I weirdly remember how JioMeet had copied the Zoom app pixel-to-pixel. Not even a designer could point out the differences between the two. Anyways, this gave me a lazy & poor impression of Jio’s design philosophy. Parallelly, Google & FB had acquired huge stakes in Jio, so copying the design was a major turn-off.
Anyways, let’s get back to the appreciation. hehe.
My favorite team CSK was getting closer to victory. It was 1 am & guess what? 2.5 crore people live in Jio cinema. I started watching the match and I must say there was no lag, the engineering team had done their job. I was concerned about the design, let’s teardown the whole product experience. I’d have my fair share of assumptions on the way.
Playstore & Onboarding
I quickly searched for Jio Cinema & saw a huge heading saying TATA IPL 2023. I was like this is it. It only asked for my mobile number & the OTP was quick.
I had not expected such fast loading times as I knew it’s gonna be D-Day for the Jio team to serve crores of viewers.
A huge banner saying TATA IPL 2023 WATCH LIVE appears, it was quite fast. I was expecting a slow-lazy experience.
The onboarding was just a chef’s kiss.
Match viewing starts
There were no walkthrough journeys, I got exactly what I wanted. Although Jio has some great features, they wanted me to start watching the match directly. Which is a great choice, I would skip a walkthrough while the match is going on.
10 Minutes down the line, during one of the ads. I saw a bright pink button - HYPE. Looks like something new! Let’s explore
Discovering the whole new world
Hinglish Copy
Time for some context, on the day of the IPL finale - Jio was broadcasting IPL for free.
The cards on the right side of the image - were a series of prompts & facts from the commentary of the match, which was based on the live events which were happening.
Now, if you closely look at the image, the first card on the top right is written in Hinglish (Hindi written in English). In my opinion, Hinglish currently is the safest & the best bet if you have an audience that belongs to the “Bharat”.
This Hinglish copy could be a result of viewing the match in Hindi commentary, but people don’t like to see the scores, stats & commentary in Hindi.
The word “hype” conveys the meaning of the feature, but I don’t know if it is understood by everyone who uses the app. Disclaimer - No app can cater to 100% but I guess a large portion of Jio’s audience might not know the meaning of the word “hype”.
Hotstar - the ex-ipl star… :(
Hotstar on the other end had a chat feature for all the viewers. Having used it multiple times I used to like it, supremely engaging.
In my opinion, it was a better offering than Jio’s hype feature, Why do I say so? the chat feature was a non-abstract way of showing the hype + you could even add your input to the hype, which might be more engaging I guess.
Continuing the exploration
After exploring the hype tab, I move on to the scores tab.
Because of the 60:40 split screen, navigating the scoreboard was just smooth. Another approach could be keeping it on the bottom, which could facilitate anyone to use it via both hands.
Let’s take a scenario, you and your friends are at a restaurant, you all settle down & you start the IPL on your phone. You have no way to understand who has already batted & who is left to bat or how many overs are left with Bumrah. You tell your friend to check the full scorecard on Cricbuzz. This exact behavior is what they targeted in my opinion. No one would go to another app to view the scoreboard. Now it’s all integrated.
Lovely to see the level of detail they have covered. I would easily say this is much better than even a television to watch the match if you’re a hardcore enthusiast.
You’d ask me, hardcore enthusiasts? Who would want to look at stats while watching a match? Is it a must-have feature or a good to have?My answer - This is an assumption, but if you look at the numbers - The popularity & frequency of people making educated guesses. Yup, let’s call it an educated guess that has increased. Dream 11’s numbers are at an all-time high - the result of this might be, people looking at the stats and making guesses.
All this could be preventing users from going to Cricbuzz.
Personalized Match Cams
This is a good-to-have feature, although supremely delightful at the very start. But, it does get boring after a point to view the match with one single cam. Especially when we are used to so many switching cams.
Currently, the selection of camera angles is done by a producer at the studio, you can watch this video — it’s all done manually. It’s an awesome video, a must-watch.
IDEA - If users could select their set of fav angles & the whole experience showed switching only between these angles. It would be awesome.
The question - Will users come back to the JioCinema app after the IPL?
Hot take - Not for a long time, the current association of Jio cinema is with IPL. They’d have to create strong triggers for the users to visit the app again.
Why do I say this? - It must be very difficult to break the current association of JioCinema with IPL. It is so strong that some users would prefer Jio Cinema for cricket, not for any other form of content. Which is negative for Jio. Although take this with a pinch of salt, wild assumptions.
Some strong triggers that could bring users back to JioCinema could be -
Great content (They now have the rights to broadcast HBO)
Jio produces quality content.
Other sports & cricket matches (Go back to the sports content associated with JioCinema).
Current Jio Team
Forget whatever happened with JioMeet, I am now excited for the new set of talent they are hiring. The current CDO of Viacom18 (JioCinema) Duncan Riley looks pretty promising.
I trust they would value design more than ever before. Super excited.
That’s it. I’d be publishing more notes on some product breakdowns, subscribe if you like to read them.
~ Priyansh Singara