From niche TV app to 600k weekly users

The Problem

An app nobody could explain the point of

In 2016 the BBC Sport TV app had 80,000 weekly users. That sounds like a lot until you remember it's the BBC. Internally, it was the poor relation to mobile and laughable in the face of iPlayer.

It was a clip library on a television. The same clips were available everywhere else, and watching them on a TV meant a loading pause between every one. One-minute clips with a 20-second loading time in a lean-back and settle-down environment. Nobody had asked what a TV sports app should do differently from a phone, and instead just pushed the same content from mobile experiences to the TV.

The Insight

Nobody wanted short clips on a big TV. They wanted something to settle into.

We ran a series of research sessions understanding how people actually watch sport at home and their expectations of a Sport TV app. The answer was obvious the moment we heard it. Live sport, on the big screen, usually with someone else in the room.

There was a problem, however. The BBC had lost a lot of its major live rights, but a conversation with the talented head of live content in Sport revealed over a thousand hours of live sport sitting unused without a place to host it. Basketball, athletics, equestrian, wheelchair tennis, tiddlywinks world championships, and that's not made up. Loyal niche audiences, but no home in broadcast, and none of it on the TV app.

Research and relationship building had delivered a slam dunk. We needed to focus the product around live streaming.

What we did

Rebuilt the whole app around live

Event pages, scheduling information, tune-in mechanics, and contextual editorial that gave people a reason to come back before and after each session.

Event templates that scale to any sport, any event, so the team wasn't rebuilding from scratch every time a tournament came round. Small focused team, design sprints, tested prototypes, shipped iteratively.

The technical build wasn't the hardest part. Uncovering the key insight, unlocking a route to act upon it, and then making the internal case to build around it were the major leaps forward that made this work.

What happened

7× growth in six months

• Weekly active users grew from 80k to over 600k in six months
• Patterns carried into World Cup and Wimbledon coverage
• The approach fed directly into how iPlayer later handled live events
• The design platform was still in use across BBC apps years later

Why this one's here

One insight, many relationships nutured, then six months of momentum

The traffic increase was impressive, but for me the pivot was the real achievement. An underappreciated app given a new life with a thousand hours of unused content that needed a home.

It also shows the power of teams and relationships. None of this happened just because we had insights; it required making the right connections across the org to make it a reality. As a consultant, interim or perm hire, my ability to create the right collaborative relationships is often my main advantage.