Our long-lasting collaboration with Seven.One Entertainment Group tends to the technical needs of several of their initiatives and service offers. It has included building, maintaining and offering end-customer support, implementing complex content management systems, building a consent management system, bespoke products and a self-service portal.

Most recently, Seven.One Entertainment Group turned to us to help them build a new supplementary app that would turn the interactive aspects of their programming into a truly immersive experience.

Since 2009, Endava has realised projects for Seven.One Entertainment Group, a wholly-owned subsidiary of ProSiebenSat.1 Media SE. Seven.One Entertainment Group encompasses some of the most watched German-language TV channels, including ProSieben and SAT.1.

REELING IN THE BUZZ

The traditional model of audience participation via phone/text-in engagement falls short of the all-encompassing, responsive experiences familiar to today’s digital natives. To earn their attention, a new social entertainment app needed to open the floor to users’ own creativity.

Turning broadcasts into fun, social experiences creates a social incentive to tune in.

The app also needed to recapture the discussions happening around Seven.One Entertainment Group content on third-party social media and messaging sites. This requires a single, central destination for everything pertaining to their programming.

BUILDING ONE APP TO RULE THEM ALL

The task involved pulling together two software development kits (SDKs) from the client’s other apps and consolidating them into a new product. This app would facilitate voting while empowering viewers to build communities around their favourite shows.

The first SDK is an interaction tool, with uses that extend far beyond voting for a favourite contestant. It lets TV producers give viewers different ways to interact with a show, through quizzes, surveys, comments and more.

The second SDK enables live-streaming, with a view to turning viewers into content creators. Users can broadcast to each other, and their audience can respond in real-time through an in-built chat function. A viewer in Düsseldorf can invite another viewer in Munich to co-host a stream or create content simultaneously. One can even reward and support their favourite content creators through an in-app gifting economy.

These SDKs were integrated into one app that represents a new experience for the users: JoynMe. This rebrand points to the sociality and community at the heart of the user experience. JoynMe is available on both Android and iOS.

For both apps, we deployed native platform technologies, specifically Swift for iOS, and Kotlin for Android. The architecture of both apps follows clean architecture principles with layered separation of concerns. Furthermore, each domain-specific functionality is isolated in a separate module. This enables reusability and makes the codebase more easily maintainable in the long term. This approach enabled us to scale the team efficiently and shorten the time-to-market.

For the Android app, we used the latest Jetpack Compose framework to create snappy and modern UIs, which we enhanced with Lottie for eye-catching animations. To support a reactive buildout style, we chose Kotlin Coroutines. For dependency injection, we relied heavily on Koin. Instabug made squashing bugs easier than ever, and we used DataDog to track performance across systems.

On the iOS side, we used the standard UI Kit framework to build intuitive, contemporary UIs, again using Lottie to generate animations. Apple’s Combine framework also allowed for a reactive buildout style. This time, dependency injection was achieved via Resolver. Just as with the Android app, bug-squashing was performed via Instabug’s execution traces, and performance tracking through DataDog.

ALRIGHT ON THE NIGHT

The native iOS and Android apps were released in time for the new seasons of "The Masked Singer" and "The Voice of Germany" in Autumn 2022.

Once activated, the app brought together all the shows’ interactive calls to action without a hitch. All the voting was handled within the app, successfully replacing the previous phone-in method.

Viewers also enthusiastically embraced the social aspects of the new platform. While the programme aired, users chatted with each other and even live-streamed their reactions.

Endava is proud of our work to make home entertainment more fun, interactive and meaningful.