BigPond Movies

Front-End Team Lead - Massive

Telstra’s BigPond Movies developed for Intel’s Viiv media PC platform.

BigPond Movies Viiv was a Netflix-like experience which provided an intuitive interface to browse, purchase, download and watch movies and TV shows.

Overview

Titles were categorised by genre and popularity, and vetted into featured and recommended lists. Each title displayed metadata such as synopsis, cast & crew and download times. Titles could be searched by title, actor and director.

Complete e-commerce functionality was developed, including add-to-cart, cart management, checkout and purchase.

User Interface

The interface needed to support both “2-foot and 10-foot” experiences - i.e. watching movies close-up on a PC screen using mouse and keyboard, as well as the traditional TV viewing experience from a couch using a remote.

My team and I developed a complete set of interface and form components that supported both input methods simultaneously. Keyboard and mouse support was fairly straightforward, but for remote support we designed and developed each screen to be easily navigable using a directional pad and numeric buttons. For text entry over remote, I developed a complete implementation of T9 predictive text (the way text was entered on old Nokia phones).

The search functionality I developed operated completely client-side by generating several large look-up tables. As a result, search was extremely responsive, requiring no server communication.

Responsive Layout

Five years before Ethan Marcotte coined the term “responsive layout”, we developed a responsive interface for BigPond Movies. This was in a period of transition between standard and wide-screen displays, so it was critical to support any aspect ratio between 4:3 and 16:9. Every screen and individual interface component supported dynamic resizing to fit its parent component.

Accolades

BigPond Movies Viiv was nominated for Best Interactive TV Service at the International Emmy Awards. Unfortunately we were up against BBCi, a worthy opponent which took the prize.