Eros Now
Eros Now is the streaming service of Eros International – the largest producer and distributor of Indian cinema.
Available on iTunes and Google Play.
After failed attempts to get Eros Now off the ground in India, Eros International looked to Silicon Valley to build a team. My long time colleague, Shampa Banerjee, gave me the opportunity to do two things: 1) Use my knowledge of UX to uncover behavior of a foreign market and 2) design a complex service (music, music videos, tv, and movies!) for every major OTT device.
Onboarding
When I joined, the onboarding process was a teaser of 15 minutes of the selected stream followed by a signup. It was a poorly communicated tease that lead to a high percentage of abandonment.
The redesign of our website and subsequent launch of our mobile products opened up the floodgates of users. We were getting 250,000 new subscribers a week.
Movies
We identified early on that Indian users were mostly limited to wi-fi connections for watching movies; and that most data plans were to expensive to justify streaming a movie. We introduced downloads for offline viewing long before our competition.
Music
Regional languages are very important in India and people want their content localized. We also learned that our users wanted editorial playlists, so they could find something quickly that matched their mood. Card sorting excercizes were employed to determine what moods and themes we should lead with.
Customer Engagement
Even though Eros International had the largest catalog of Bollywood movies, users were always craving new content. The company’s rollout of original content was constantly delayed, so it was up to our product team to come up with alternative ways to engage our audience.
Some products we created were:
- Star Pages
- Email Marketing
- Title Destination
- Discovery Tools
- Stickers
