Rio 2016 Olympics ready, set, press red

I’m Jennifer Richardson and I’m a Senior Product Manager in BBC Design & Engineering based in Salford. I’m the Product Manager for BBC Red Button+ and the BBC Sport and BBC News apps on connected TV.

In close collaboration with product and editorial teams from BBC Sport, BBC Live and BBC News – and along with colleagues in Engineering and User Experience & Design, we’ve reimagined the BBC’s connected TV experience ahead of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, relaunching our News, Sport and, most recently, Red Button+ products.

We’ve also launched an enhanced experience for all live coverage of our major sporting, cultural and music events, including the Olympic Games.

The Rio Olympic Games presents a key opportunity to provide our audience with the best possible experience on their connected TV; we want our audience to feel like they’re at the event and never miss a moment of the action.

When we set out to rethink Red Button+, our goal was to provide frictionless access from BBC television channels to compelling content from BBC iPlayer, Sport and News and more.

We’ve done this by improving the navigation between all of our BBC TV apps – and we’ve given BBC News and Sport a makeover, unifying design and interaction patterns so that users of BBC iPlayer will discover a familiar pattern when browsing, watching or reading content across all BBC products.

During the BBC’s Olympic coverage on television, ‘pressing red’ on your connected TV will instantly connect you with up to 24 HD streams of live coverage from BBC Sport, so nobody needs to miss a moment of the action that they want to watch.

We’ve made it easy to navigate to other sports, restart coverage if the start of an event has been missed, get the latest highlights, see what action’s coming up and catch up on any medal moments from previous days.

Plus it’s now even easier to access BBC iPlayer from a connected TV by ‘pressing red’, giving our audience a quick way to find the programmes they want to watch, or quickly restart the programme they are currently watching.

An innovative engineering solution underpins this change to our audience-facing products, meaning all our connected TV apps now share a common code-base, known internally as TAP (TV Application Platform). This approach eases the burden on support teams, enables faster product innovation and helps us to make our content available on more devices more easily - all through practical adoption of platform-thinking.

Jennifer Richardson is Senior Product Manager in BBC Design & Engineering.

• The BBC are the official broadcaster for the Rio 2016 Olympics in the UK.
• Find out more about Red Button+ and TV support.
• For more about BBC Sports Rio 2016 Olympics coverage read Kieran Clifton's blog 'The Rio 2016 Olympic Games, live on the BBC'.