NBCU And Telemundo Stations Introduce New Mobile Apps

NBCUniversal Local unveiled 35 new mobile apps for its NBC and Telemundo stations on Thursday, a redesign that comes on the heels of an overhaul of the broadcaster’s CMS and its launch of new websites in 2019.

Underlying the new iteration is the need for parity across platforms, says Pranav Kamkhalia, SVP of product and technology, along with the desire for more speed, greater weather functionality and a new video hub, all of which the new app delivers.

Pranav Kamkhalia

The app also solves a deep internal frustration, Kamkhalia says. Previously, “it wasn’t using the best of our features. Sometimes you work so hard in creating a content piece that sits very well on mobile web. But on native, every time you have to do a new build or yet another optimization for that content to show up.

“It was always a catch-up game rather than trying to stay ahead of the curve,” he says.

In other words, some of the best elements NBCU Local’s digital teams were cooking up for stories weren’t iterating optimally on its own apps, and that was a problem both internally and for users.

“Our app users are our most loyal users,” says Josh Kleinbaum, VP of digital content. “They consume a lot of content at a time, they come back often, and frankly, that is where we want to drive all of our users. We want them to have the best experience.”

Now they can, he says, and previously elusive platform parity has been reached by an overhaul under the hood.

Josh Kleinbaum

Users can also get content twice as fast, Kamkhalia says. “We have written every single line of API code from the ground up,” he says. “We have reduced our payload size by 50% or even 70%.”

Along with that, latest news content will surface to users’ attention more readily rather than being just siloed into specific categories. NBC stations’ apps were always updating throughout the day, Kamkhalia says, but the way stories were flowing into the app didn’t always make that as evident as it is now.

NBC and Telemundo’s station apps buck an industry trend of segregating news and weather into different apps. “It doesn’t make sense to us to separate news from weather,” Kleinbaum says. “Weather is news.”

In the new iteration, weather gets an even bigger role with more functionality and data points on hand.

A centerpiece there is radar “without anything interrupting the screen,” Kamkhalia says. “We really enhanced the radar experience, made a full screen and made it edge to edge to make it really beautiful.” Radar now also features a continuous timeline so the more meteorologically intense among users can track it across hours.

Those same users apt to “geek out on weather data” will have a range of new data to peruse, Kamkhalia says. “They want to see the dew point, they want to see the wind conditions, they want to see the UV index, so we gave them that additional information, but in a collapsed mode.”

Weather content is also never far from news, he says, and vice versa.

A last major upgrade is a video hub on the app. Previously, video lived attached to specific stories, but now users can see all the current video content housed together in a single section.

“There was a segment of users who really love to consume videos one after another because it is just such an easy way to digest information,” Kamkhalia says.

More customization options for alerts and the ability for users to swipe more easily between stories round out the improvements. Down the road, Kamkhalia says the new architecture will allow for even more personalization along with expanding possibilities for ad units. “The way we have designed the system is pretty flexible for us to add units depending on how or where we need it,” he says.

Kamkhalia says the redesign process validated NBC and Telemundo stations’ practice of keeping their development in-house. “It gives a lot of control,” he says. “You want to have more control, more insight into the product itself because then you can build in the most optimized fashion.

“It does put us in a place where we can control our destiny.”