The Project.
Through this unique service, customers can download media onto their portable GoChip devices and watch their favorite movies and TV shows anywhere—without an internet connection—on their phone, tablet, or computer.
Solid digital partnered with gochip to develop a responsive, web-based storefront and digital content platform. We were selected for this project based on our proven track record of designing and building media discovery, commerce and delivery platforms. Solid Digital has over 10 years of experience creating solutions for studios, startups, and all types of entertainment companies. We combined this expertise along with services from our strategic partners for content licensing to provide a solid product development strategy to launch their MVP (Minimum Viable Product) within 3 months. Following the launch of GoChip’s MVP we continued to iterate on the platform and released a series of planned feature and functionality enhancements delivering added value to their customers month over month.
Goals & Challenges
Our work with GoChip required the following outcomes:
- Design and development of a responsive storefront
- Dynamic content ingestion
- DRM compliance
- Desktop application integration
All media discovery and commerce platforms have many moving pieces. Content ingestion, content aggregation, licensing, merchandising, metadata management, analytics, storefront design (the list goes on and on).
This project came with some unique challenges in that the technology employed to store and play digital media is a USB dongle that acts like a CDN (content delivery network). This content—consumed via desktop and mobile devices—is easily accessible to users on the go, even without an internet connection.
Solid Digital provided all of the services that the desktop app and mobile applications needed to properly integrate a customer’s licensed content with the devices that they were using to play back the content.
Our Approach
We start all of these types of engagements with our collaborative “Design & Discovery” process.
This comprehensive planning process includes traditional software/technical discovery, with the added bonus of establishing user experience guidelines and fully-realized design mockups. We’ve found this to be truly valuable for our process, and the reception from clients has been very positive. Our engagement with the GoChip team involved lots of close collaboration on UX, design, product management and engineering. This collaboration allowed us to break silos and create alignment around what the product was and what it could be.
At the end of this Design & Discovery phase we had a full product roadmap that could now be accurately estimated and developed. To top it all off, all of the creative assets that would be required to do the work were also completed and ready to go.
Workflow
The only way we could deliver this solution on such a short timeframe was to use a true agile approach to product development and project management.
Upon completion of the Design & Discovery process, we took the entire list of functionality requirements and organized them based on business priority and effort level. Once prioritized estimates were established, we provided a detailed sprint plan that illuminated the best path towards launching the MVP. This plan allowed us to release the MVP within the 3 month time frame and continue to evolve the platform over the next 3 months with additional feature enhancements.
By using the agile methodology we were able to adapt to changing business needs on a weekly basis and move features in and out of their MVP plan based on the current needs of their stakeholders and customers.
Integrating Systems
In addition to collaborating on new technologies like the GoChip Beam, this project gave us the opportunity to integrate a third party platform, Vubiquity, for content licensing. Working on these systems integrations are like exciting puzzles to put together and a core focus of our team. The intuitive way we designed the roadmap and planned for the future set this project apart and allowed for a seamless integration between platforms.
Results
During our design and discovery phase, we worked with GoChip to outline a set of goals that would ensure a successful project delivery.
The KPI that was most important to GoChip was to deliver promised production grade functionality for a set of milestones that they communicated to their stakeholders. We were able to come up with a velocity for our progress and predictably provide an accurate roadmap to their team and investors. Solid Digital delivered on every major commitment that we made and provided the MVP in 3 months as promised and the full roadmap of feature and functionality enhancements in 6 months.
