RTVE Play

RTVE Play is the new global platform from RTVE public television. With RTVE Play you can get the access to all the video content of the digital catalog from RTVE. The HbbTV application allows the access to everyone easily without the necessity to install anything in your conected TV, linking your device with your RTVE user profile. It has been developed on Angular 9 framework, extending easily the core implementation for HbbTV to other SmartTV platforms with specific features. It's the best way to consume RTVE Play and enjoy a complete experience.

Description

RTVE Play app replaces and improves RTVE alacarta and born as the new global platform to consume multimedia content on RTVE site, mobile and connected TVs apps, including HbbTV and SmartTV platforms. RTVE Play allows to access all the content available in the digital catalog from RTVE, offering also live broadcasts channels and exclusive live and ondemand contents to enjoy a full experience. All our favorite TV shows, series, documentaries and movies at your disposal from the comfort of your television. The HbbTV app has been developed on the Angular 9 framework, using typescript as programming language. The resulting app has demostrated a great compatibility with the most of connected TVs under the HbbTV protocol and offers the possibility of categorizing and organizing modules and components in a very simple and efficient way. Taking advantage of this characteristics, it has been developed from the approach of having a HbbTV core application and extend it easily to SmatTV solutions for generic use, through weblinking access, or specific solutions as the ones for Samsung or LG, including not HbbTV features as enable mouse control. This structure helps us easily identify where to develop next applications upgrades and improvements. The core HbbTV app includes features as: - Access to the complete digital catalog by channels and thematics, with highligted contents that you can not miss. - Access to broadcast live channels and exclusive live contents for sport events (as Olympics from July to September), Goya Awards, La Palma 24h vulcano eruption, ... - Searcher for TV shows, movies, documentaries, episodes, ... - Availability for linking your TV device with your RTVE user account. This provides the features for saving your favorite content to enjoy it anytime on any device, or pick up where you left off. - Recommendations tailored to the users needs for discovering new shows, movies and series.

Impact

Angular 9 offers the availability of categorizing and organizing modules and components, together with the approach based on the extension of a core HbbTV app to develop apps for SmartTV platforms, the easy integration with legacy modules used in RTVE and a new design and improved usability, all translate on that implementation times has been reduced significantly. It has been simplified the use of common modules for apps upgrades and new developments and once that it's implemented a new feature for the core app, it's available for the other ones. The devolpment team has estimated of around 40% less effort compared with previous implementations. From the consumption point of view, it has been detected an important increase on the number of different contents that have played into the new app vs Alacarta. For example, only in HbbTV, there has been and increase from 13,191 different contents consumed on September of 2020 to 23,240 on September of this year (+43%). This is probably due to the effort to promote the discovery, by providing a diversification on ways in which contents can be accessed: - Menu organized by channels and thematics. - Searcher that provides access to all the movies, documentaries, series and tv shows. - Tailored recommendations by series, tv shows, movies or documentaries. Besides, it is planned to add an additional menu option to access by the EPG to live and ondemand contents, thinking on users that use the emission dates to consume contents.