Nat Geo portal relaunches with video
Release date: February 4, 2008
National Geographic Channel interactive service on Sky has been radically redesigned and re-engineered by Pushbutton to switch the emphasis to bonus video and promotional show reels for hot new shows.
The application launches with a totally new look based on a dedicated ‘skin’ design for each popular series. The plan is that there will be several of these dedicated skins launching over the next few months – with a new one appearing every couple of weeks to chime with NGC promotional activity around big premieres and new series launches.
The new design has been achieved by creating the most flexible palette for an interactive TV service that Pushbutton has created to date. All assets including bitmap images, backgrounds, video streams, and button shapes can be quickly re-assembled to create new skins – allowing much greater creative freedom for interactive producers.
Popular interactive features from the previous application such as fact ticker, votes, competitions, and viewers club are carried forward into the new application, but with a more attractive image- heavy look and minimal text.
The interactive service has been strengthened on the back end to allow NGC to use its interactive service more effectively as a vehicle for sponsors.
The application now supports things like ‘deep linking’ from a trigger directly to a specific item in the application. Multiple responses with different phone tariffs are supported to allow a sponsoring car manufacturer, for example, to embed a brochure or test drive request into its sponsors’ area.
Direct sign up to the popular viewers club is now also supported by the red button service, allowing NGC to aggressively market membership via its interactive TV service.
James Cumberbatch, Pushbutton’s Director of Interactive Television, said “With top quality short-form videos always available from National Geographic channel – it made sense in the YouTube era to plug that into NGC’s interactive TV service. It just works, simple as that.”