A start page for the TV experience
Revisiting the Promoter (2026)
- Role
- Designer and builder, AI as build capacity
- Context
- Personal concept, follow-up to the 2018 Viaplay Promoter
- Platform
- TV, remote and focus-based navigation, web prototype
- Year
- 2026
In 2018 I designed the Promoter, a concept for making Viaplay the most inspiring streaming service on the biggest screen in the home. It was built in Keynote, good enough to test the feeling but not the real thing. This is the same question, eight years later, built as a working prototype. And the scope is wider: not one service, but a start page for everything the TV has become, from film and series to music and the home.
Key design decisions
Inspiration and overview, by design. The 2018 test showed that inspiration came at the cost of overview. Here, one press collapses the hero into a calm, scannable overview, and one press brings it back.
Focus you can read from the sofa. Focused items lift and scale with depth rather than relying on colour, so the focus is legible from across the room.
Pitching, still. Heroes lead with an emotional line instead of a synopsis, a principle carried over from the Promoter.
Built on tvOS, but not a copy. Apple’s focus model is the interaction baseline. The visual identity is my own: immersive visuals with ambient light and colours that reflect the content.
Responsive interactions. Movement follows your pace: quick presses accelerate and settle, giving a sense of flow and immersion with full control.
How it was built
I designed and built the prototype myself, with AI as build capacity, iterating between Figma and code. Film and series data is live; music, calendar and home use curated snapshots of my own accounts.
What I would test next
The prototype shows what the experience could feel like. Whether it helps people decide what to watch, and whether the balance between inspiration and overview is right, is a question only real users can answer.