The Project
Redbox has a great story in terms of market disruption. They were originally a concept created in the R&D department of McDonald’s, but ended up breaking off and becoming the largest, physical, movie rental company in the world. Eventually, the pricing and convenience of kiosk rentals (along with Netflix’s mail order offering) disrupted their market and brought down the biggest players.
Now, they are attempting to disrupt the Video on Demand market by launching a new service which they believe will be a repeat of their earlier success. Our team partnered with Redbox to design and develop an Apple TV application to support this expansion.
In 2014 as Redbox was making the initial decision to build their own streaming solution or rent it, we submitted our proposal for the custom built option. In the end Redbox decided to use a pre-built solution to get to market faster. Three years later, they were ready to launch but had not built apps for all the devices they had hoped to cover—Apple TV being the most prominent.
This was the opportunity for Solid Digital to showcase our capabilities in TV interface design and Smart TV OTT application development.
Goals & Challenges
The biggest challenges on this project were limited time and challenging technology. Redbox needed to get this product up and running within 3 months to cover the holiday rush. On the technical side, the supporting service had to change their security libraries mid way through development. Our team had to be agile enough to support them.
Our Approach
Our engineering team is very nimble. We had to keep tight constraints on scope to make sure we knew exactly what we had to do.
Once the definitions were in place, we pre-defined the sprint schedule that seemed realistic and constantly monitored operations to keep an eye on risks. In terms of the midcourse technology adjustments, the risks were incredibly high. We lost some of the testing time we had planned, and a mutual decision was made by Redbox and Solid Digital to adjust the launch date to accommodate the changes.
In the end, we were able to launch the product before Christmas, as planned.
Workflow
We were aware that time was critical for this project. There were a lot of discussions around what could and couldn’t be done for launch. As a service provider, it is sometimes hard to acknowledge we can’t do everything that a customer may want to do because of outside constraints.
For this project, we had to limit some of the features and strategize together to know what and when we would be providing for the initial phase. However, it was important to see beyond launch, as well, so we knew how to engineer the design and application to incorporate the additional features we had to forego.
Conclusion
Redbox is continuing to find ways to increase their footprint both in the physical and the digital world. We enjoyed working on this small portion of their endeavor.
