When it comes to media (be it music or movies or television) two important words are discovery and personalization. When Sling TV announced their latest UI update, at this year’s CES, they put discovery and personalization at the forefront. The new UI, which will be coming to users sometime in the next few months, centers on helping users both find new things to watch and keep the content they’re watching most at the forefront.
According to Sling, the updated UI will focus on these main points:
• MY TV: Customers will be able to find all of their favorite content in the MY TV view, including their most viewed channels and shows. This is also where customers will be able to resume watching content that they previously started but were not able to finish. In future releases, recommended content based on customer preference, as well as “hot” content based on viewing behavior across the service and social trends, will also be found in this view.
• ON NOW: This view will be automatically curated based on what is currently on TV and will be organized by content categories. In upcoming releases, the service will learn customer behaviors and the associated content ribbons will automatically reorder themselves to align with those behaviors.
In this view, customers will also have the option to see what else is currently on in Sling TV’s “Extras,” even if they do not subscribe to them. Purchase or subscription options are presented with recommended content.
• SPORTS: The past year has proven that Sling TV customers love sports. With the new UI, sports fans can easily watch their favorite team, sport, conference and more. This view shows live and upcoming sports events and can be manually filtered based on the viewer’s preference.
• TV SHOWS: TV lovers will be able to find all of the currently available episodes of their favorite shows in a singular view. The new category filters include featured content, trending shows and even full collections.
• MOVIES: Similar to the TV SHOWS view, the MOVIES view puts all movies into one place including live, linear and on-demand content. Free movies and movies for rent will be clearly identified in this view.
As someone who uses Sling TV, on Xbox One, I’m most interested in this update because Xbox had announced a few weeks ago that Sling TV was going to be integrated with their Oneguide service. In doing so, Sling TV becomes a content provider that is aggregated amongst other services like Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and more to help Xbox One users quickly see what’s available to watch in a variety of places. With their new UI, Sling connects right on in with Oneguide’s mission of making content easy to discover and more applicable to each individual user.
As announced, users can look forward to this update within the first quarter of 2016.
Source – Sling TV Blog
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