JioCinema × Viacom18 · Live sports · Dec 2022 to Apr 2023
Hype
An interactivity layer that sits below the player and never competes with the match, built to turn passive IPL viewing into participation.
- Role
- Product definition, UX research, UI
- Ownership
- Interactivity modules, CMS end to end
- Worked with
- PMs at JioCinema and Jio Engage, FE engineers, design leads, JE ops
- Timeline
- Dec 2022 to Apr 2023
The problem
Cricket in India is a collective emotion. Stadiums, fan parks, living rooms full of shouting people. Covid moved all of it onto individual screens, and IPL 2023 streamed free on JioCinema to an audience watching alone. The brief that came out of that was to design a “below the player” interactivity companion that boosts participation without ever pulling focus from the stream.
Why it was hard
Non intrusive was the mandate, not a preference
The companion sat below the player and could never pull attention from live video. That ruled out most of what normally drives engagement, including overlays, modals and notifications, before design started. It also had to stay light and hold its shape on small screen devices, because device heating and data usage were live constraints on phones already streaming HD cricket.
Engagement and the registration wall pulled opposite ways
The business needed registration walls to capture first party data. Research said activation friction is exactly what kills participation mid match. Both were true, and the product had to satisfy both without pretending the tension didn't exist.
Moderation had to be instant, not eventual
Open chat at IPL concurrency means profanity, religious slurs and brand safety risk arriving faster than any human queue clears them. Moderation that lags is a stream that lags, so the tooling had to let ops act in bulk and ahead of time rather than message by message.
The call I made
I built the CMS as configurable modules instead of an IPL control panel.
Anchor chat, polls, predictions, commentary and the sticker layer were each built as independent blocks a content team could switch on or off per property, not fields shaped around a cricket match.
Build the admin the tournament actually needed. IPL was the deadline and cricket was the content, so every field could reasonably have been modelled on a match: anchor, over, team, player, fixture.
Treat each interactivity type as a module with its own configuration, so the same system could run a property it was never designed for. That is what carried the format past the tournament instead of rebuilding it for each show.
What shipped
Anchor Chat.
The name asking the question is a trained anchor working to a script. Personalisation at IPL scale, without the risk of a live public figure.
Chat as Star.
The same story from the ops side. A moderator takes a star identity and answers as them, which is what made the format survivable across a whole season.
Moderation.
Approve or reject, in bulk, ahead of time. On the phone, the same system telling a viewer their message did not make it.
How it landed
Ran through IPL 2023 as JioCinema's interactivity layer below the player, across every match of the season.
users engaged
chat responses
stickers shared
Hype Chat, IPL 2023. Feature specific figures reported by the product team. A two designer team outcome; the CMS was mine end to end.
Because the CMS was built around modules rather than matches, the same interactivity system configured entertainment properties after the tournament. The format outlived the season it was built for.
In hindsight
I designed the CMS around what could be configured, not around how fast someone configures it at 7pm on match day. Ops speed deserved as much attention as ops flexibility.