On a mobile device, great content is secondary to how easily it is accessed. These days, there’s great content everywhere, and it takes no time at all for a potential viewer to move from one too-cluttered user experience to something smoother.

“We firmly believe the content we have speaks for itself, so our goal was to not get in the way of potential audiences on the hunt,” said Drew Pisarra, vice president of digital media at SundanceTV. The indie-oriented channel’s new mobile offering is now available in the App Store, featuring a constantly updating cache of on-demand episodes of popular series such as Rectify and Top of the Lake, a live stream of the on-air broadcast, and most excitingly for movie buffs – select feature-length films and shorts from the event that inspired it, the Sundance Film Festival. With material like that available, Pisarra said his team “simply wanted the app to serve up visuals in a manner that didn’t inhibit intuitive behavior. The less clicks, the better.”

The SundanceTV app is built around vivid show photography that highlights the cinematic quality of its offerings. Users can set reminders to live-stream episodes or movies in real time, and share what speaks to them through the requisite social platforms. Other than that, bonus features are few and far between.

“We actually chose to move away from cluttering the app with too much ancillary content and to focus it instead on pure viewing experiences,” said Pisarra.

Sundance’s intimate ties to its namesake film festival creates potential for flexible in-app programming. The kind of viewer SundanceTV draws, for instance, would likely be as excited by the appearance of the riveting Stanley Kubrick-themed documentary (and Sundance Film Fest fave) Room 237 as he would be by a collection of short films organized around a central theme.

“This month, for instance, we’ve partnered with Rooftop Films and are programming a festival of stellar horror shorts that will run in conjunction with the upcoming second season of The Returned,” said Pisarra, “which will premiere on SundanceTV on Halloween night. These horror shorts range from animation to slasher to Eraserhead-like, so they’re quite engaging.”

The Sundance digital team is also “exploring future opportunities around the 2016 festival,” said Pisarra. From red-carpet interviews at high-profile screenings to midnight screenings and beyond, come this January or future Januarys, the SundanceTV app could offer a hub of on-site and on-demand content that synthesizes engagement for both sides of the equation – event and channel.

Tags:


  Save as PDF