Yalantis
Works
Developing smart TV applications for a non-profit organization

Assisting a non-profit organization with expanding their target audience via smart TV app development

Learn how we assisted a non-profit in creating smart TV apps and helped them expand their reach on four of the most popular smart TV platforms in the Canadian market, leading to an increase in app downloads and new users. Explore our approach to development and the results we achieved.

Industry

Non-profits
Country

Canada
Team size

5 IT experts
Collaboration

August 2022 – February 2023

VALUE DELIVERED

Over five months of collaboration with Amazing Discoveries, we have:

successfully developed and launched 4 smart TV apps (Samsung, LG, Amazon Fire, and Android TV)
increased the number of new Samsung TV viewers by 4 times
increased the new audience engagement by 3.4 times
achieved a 95% customer satisfaction rating
reduced development costs, as the Amazon Fire and Android TV apps operate on the same code
successfully adapted the existing legacy framework to a new environment

About the client

Amazing Discoveries is a Canadian religious non-profit organization that was formed in 1993 as a space for public campaigns and seminars, sermons, and religious events. In the 2000s, Amazing Discoveries developed a website to host and spread educational videos, articles, and interviews.

BUSINESS CONTEXT

Amazing Discoveries has been collaborating with Yalantis for over two years. Yalantis has assisted the client in developing mobile apps for iOS and Android and is currently working on updating the company’s legacy website to make it more responsive and easier to use.

Before working with Yalantis, Amazing Discoveries already had a proprietary video streaming platform and used it as the main educational channel on their website. However, they wanted to increase the number of ADTV viewers and offer more ways for people to view their educational videos. That’s why Amazing Discoveries asked us to develop smart TV apps that would cover the most popular smart TV platforms.

SOLUTION OVERVIEW

To meet the client’s needs, our business analysts performed market research and identified the most popular smart TV models and most used TV applications in the Canadian market. Based on this information, we agreed on developing four smart TV apps for:
- Samsung TVs, as these are the most commonly used smart TV devices among existing viewers
- LG and Amazon Fire TVs
- TVs running the Android TV operating system
Establishing full operational visibility and kicking off the project

During our discovery phase, we focused on gathering project requirements from stakeholders and establishing the communication flow. This included:
- identifying key stakeholders and their expectations
- formulating the approval flow for UI designs and app prototypes
- establishing and documenting review and approval processes and making sure stakeholders were actively involved in them
- gathering technological requirements for the project: required application types, current project environment, performance benchmarks, publishing guidelines (for Android TV and Amazon Fire TV)
Outlining development processes

Since Amazing Discoveries is our long-term partner, the majority of communication processes were already established. At this stage, we defined the scope of work for this particular project and created a workflow for each stage of development. The roadmap included the following stages:
- Stage #1: Establishing objectives for the smart TV apps. Our business analyst performed thorough market research and identified the most popular smart TV platforms in the client’s target markets.
- Stage #2: Creating app prototypes. Our designers collaborated with the client’s team to establish the main functionality of each smart TV app before proceeding with the design.
- Stage #3: Creating a UI layout for each app. We made sure that each smart TV app has a convenient and pleasant UI layout that takes into account user behavior and preferences.
- Stage #4: Deploying new features of the smart TV app. We focused on developing home screen and video player functionality with the ability to sort content by topic, speaker, and other categories. Once we were sure that the primary functionality was integrated and working correctly, we tasked a QA team with testing it.
- Stage #5: Testing smart TV apps on real devices. We performed a series of thorough tests to examine the performance of each app and eliminate issues before launch.
- Stage #6: Documenting new features and test results. This was done to make sure we could easily roll back to previous versions if the test results were unsatisfactory. We also gathered documentation from publishing platforms (Android TV and Amazon Fire TV) to ensure that the applications met platform requirements.
- Stage #7: Delivering the final results to the client. Once we had ensured that everything was running smoothly, we presented the smart TV applications to the client and launched them on all platforms.
Spreading awareness with a smart TV app

As a non-profit organization, Amazing Discoveries focuses on content quality and delivery to spread awareness and increase the number of potential donors. This influenced some decisions during our development process, leading us to:
- improve the user experience for the current Canadian audience and choose streaming platforms to reach new audiences in the US
- rework code from the Android TV app to develop an Amazon Fire TV app, which helped us reduce development costs
- review each design iteration with the client’s team to ensure that it aligned with the organization’s vision and objectives