Just in time for the fall premiere season, NBC has pushed fresh updates for two of its iPad apps. The main NBC app (below) now features full-episode streaming, and the NBC Live second-screen app picked up some new social features.
We spoke with Vivi Zigler, president, NBCUniversal Digital Entertainment, about the refreshed apps. “The timing felt right to us,” she said about waiting until now to launch full episodes, noting that the fall season is right around the corner. “We wanted to make sure we were rock solid on the technology.” As for whether NBC is considering TV Anywhere authentication like Fox, “at this point, it’s not part of the plan,” she said, explaining that NBCU’s distribution arm has been examining that approach.
Zigler said they’ve rolled out new tweaks to NBC Live (above) based on lessons the network has learned from how people use the second-screen app (here’s our original story on the launch). I’ve paraphrased a few here:
All shows are different
Zigler said they noticed a wide range of viewer interaction spanning scripted, reality and live TV shows, which helps inform what shows they focus on inside the app for the new season. The shining moment for the NBC Live app so far was The Voice, which attracted more interaction than any other NBC show on the app to date. “It naturally caused you to have an opinion,” Zigler said. “It was the perfect vehicle to bring that to the forefront.”
Seamless Facebook and Twitter integration
People expected to be able to share their comments on Facebook and Twitter, as well as have the ability to log in via either service, Zigler said. Those features have since been added to the app.
Keep content inside the app experience
One of the recommendations from users was they wanted content and interaction — like slideshows, video and polls — to not interrupt the app conversation. Zigler said they watched how users interact with different elements — for example, how long it took for viewers to vote on a poll — and they improved interface to ensure content complimented the social stream.
Be platform-agnostic
During last season’s of The Voice, NBC found people wanted to vote for the contestants via the app just like they could via NBC.com. The network added the feature and received “a lot of positive feedback,” Zigler said. In fact, at the end of the season, NBC was seeing more viewer votes online (web + mobile) than phone voting, a first “in the history of any TV show we’ve done with voting,” she said. This is further evidence that an increasing number of users don’t draw distinctions between platforms, and web expectations carry over into the app universe (and vice-versa.)
Keep apps focused
I asked Zigler if the network planned on merging the NBC app (video) with the NBC Live app (interaction). “I don’t see us doing a mashup of those two apps anytime soon,” she said, pointing out that there’s “an elegance” to building an app with a specific purpose. Besides, she said the NBC app has a lot of moving parts, and NBC Live allows the team to iterate more rapidly on experimental features. One downside to this approach, however, is some users are confused that NBC Live doesn’t offer video, which is evidenced by several negative comments in the iTunes store.
Zigler said that social TV and the second-screen are priorities for NBC because “TV is all about the fans…. Anything that the fans want to do with us that we can do, we want to enable that.” And these days, fans want to interact.