What’s left to do for an Internet video streaming service looking to stand apart from its ravenous competitors? Netflix and, increasingly, Amazon have the market cornered on high-profile original series. Rogers’ and Shaw’s Shomi has the whole anti-robot-uprising thing going with its human-curated content collections. And all those network-specific services fill in the gaps with their own specific content niches.

So for Canadian company Bell Media’s streaming service CraveTV, the latest addition to this streaming media mix, the approach to being noteworthy was not about what could be added, but about what could be taken away.

“When you look at our platform, it’s almost what’s not there,” said Jon Taylor, VP of digital products and strategy for Bell Media. “That’s a differentiator against some of our competitors.

What begins with a bare-bones price point ($4 per month) and a highly-focused content offering (“we made a clear strategic decision from the get-go that this was about TV,” said Taylor, “not kids and not movies”) extends into Crave’s look, feel and flow on desktop and mobile devices. The first major missing feature one might observe is a recommendation engine – those rows of related offerings that line up underneath whatever you’re about to watch. For Crave, those recommended videos are needless clutter, and unnecessary for a service fixated primarily on television. Netflix, the original king of recommendations, developed its system based on its original role as a purveyor of films, which are concise, self-contained entities that lend themselves to being lumped together based on other films a viewer has enjoyed. But those variables of preference, said Taylor, aren’t “necessarily true in TV series,” which are generally longer, more complicated entities. In TV, the style of the storytelling is almost more important than what’s being told. For example, The Wire and NCIS: LA could both be classified as crime shows, but recommending one to a viewer because they liked the other makes zero sense – other than the vaguest of subject categories, the two shows share absolutely nothing in common. (Not that Netflix carries either one of those shows in its streaming inventory, but if it did, it’s not hard to envision a scenario in which one pops up below the other as a recommended video.)

“You need to get [recommendations] right and no one, in my opinion, does a good job at it,” said Taylor. “It’s almost like a feature we talk about for press releases but I don’t think it drives user consumption.” Ultimately, he continued, “people know what they want to watch” and the surest guide for determining that comes from word of mouth. To that end, the Crave app simply shows users what’s trending and what’s popular, and lets them take it from there.

The reality of TV, said Taylor, is “you’re sampling that first or second episode and then you get hooked or you don’t.” Crave leaves it up to you to get hooked; once you are, it makes it as easy as possible to get reeled in, with tools like “My Cravings,” which automatically populates with shows you watch for longer than three minutes. Additionally, a single click at the end of an episode brings on the next one.

A similar principle applied to Crave’s decision to leave third-party ratings systems out of its app. TV shows are enjoyed by increasingly niche audiences, and even the highest cumulative ratings from critics, explained Taylor, don’t guarantee a show will be enjoyed by the masses.

“Even for a critically acclaimed show like The Sopranos, it’s not for everyone,” he said.

Freed from the clutter of ratings and recommendations, Crave’s user interface is sleek and spare, with a velvety black background that implies the presence of premium content. Committed to an aesthetic that mirrors quality, the app’s poster art for shows pops against the backdrop. Whenever possible, posters correspond to specific seasons, rather than offering general artwork encompassing all of a show’s seasons.

“These are little tweaks but I highlight them because the design is intended to feel like you’re entering a premium space,” said Taylor.

In the end, he continued, bells and whistles are secondary to the core tenets that provide easy access to great content: “Search needs to work flawlessly and needs to be predictive, collections need to be simple to change out, we need to display what’s new and what’s trending, and other than that we believe social media and your family and friends are going to tell you to watch,” he said. “It’s the good stuff.”

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