E! Red Carpet is the leader in pop-culture news and red carpet events broadcasting major awards such as Oscars, Emmys, and Golden Globes.
Design a multi-platform media player that contains the ability for multiple live video feeds, sponsorship, photo galleries and social features all in real-time.
All real-time products have a high bar of logistical and technological challenges. Products built with the purpose of being hosted on a web page have more limitations than apps.
Extremely well received by users and sponsors. Even before launch AT&T became our exclusive Ad partner for all the Red Carpet events of 2013-2015. Making the product revenue positive at initial launch.
With the first design we were shooting for a very robust experience.
- 3 Live Video Feeds
- Social Conversation
- Past Look Galleries
This section allows a user to switch between 3 cameras in different locations around the event. Giving the viewer full control of their favorite celebrities walk down the red carpet.
A built in Twitter feed that would allow the host to have Q&A with viewers as special celebrity guest chimed in.
This feature was meant to load photo-galleries of previous dresses celebrities wore in past red carpet events. Triggered by the celebrities' name being mention on the TV broadcast. Giving viewers the ability to compare previous looks and sparking conversation debates.
E! was striving to make this feature automated instead of manual. The plan was to use a new word recognition software made by RAMP. Which had never been tested in a live scenario. It was meant to queue up the corresponding photo-gallery in less than 3 seconds once the Live TV Host called out a celebrity's name as they walked up the red carpet.
We tested the software by applying Ramp's demo version into a streaming feed. Then, we watched past red carpet events to mimic the call outs and get a similar timing of how often the host said celebrity names. With 10 rounds of testing the fact was clear, that this feature was not ready to be done in an automated manner. We would need a manual solution at the event that would see the celebrity and publish the gallery.
In the final design we had to shelf the Past Look feature, due to the low performance of the Ramp technology.
From the initial concept of the product we made a firm design decision that the experience needed to be contained into a size that would work with multiple tablet and monitor sizes.
With minimal adjustments the design also allowed a seamless fit into the E! App with very little structure overhaul.
In 2013 when the iWatch launched, we looked into a add-on feature that would send Twitter conversation alerts as well as updates of celebrities about to walk the red carpet.
