Star+ From the Ground Up: Building a Brand-New Streaming Service for Latin America

This was originally posted as a Medium article.

We’re a few members of the team that created Star+. In this article, we’ll dive into a few key areas that played a role in bringing Star+ to life: user research, new feature design and the technology supply chain that powers it all.

Introducing Star+

Star+ is an entirely new stand-alone general entertainment & live sports streaming service that launched in 18 countries in Latin America on August 31st, 2021. Star+ combines three incredibly popular types of content — live sports, on-demand general entertainment from some of the biggest studios in the industry, and local originals from Latin America.

We wanted to ensure a high quality viewing experience for consumers whether the content was live, replay, or on-demand. And with some of the best sports content in the region as well as a massive general entertainment library of movies and shows, viewers now have many opportunities to experience this quality while streaming a live game or binging Impuros.

Getting here was no easy task, and in this article we will dive into some of the challenges we encountered and solutions we built to overcome them.

Getting Started with User Research

Our emphasis on authenticity within the local market is paramount. We strive to embody the local spirit of our audiences to deliver experiences that resonate best with them.

When we sat down to build Star+, we had an eye toward inclusion and a curiosity about the unique needs of Latin American users. We didn’t want to simply add live sports streaming content into one of our existing platforms and call it a day. Rather, our product, design and user research teams collaborated to conduct numerous research studies that helped us better understand the needs, motivations, and preferences unique to the Latin American market.

We were curious about the user expectations of sports content as well as general entertainment. Building upon the knowledge gleaned from our foundational research (as well as preexisting knowledge from other product launches), we developed and iteratively tested a variety of experiences across the user journey.

Based upon this research, we made improvements to features such as a streamlined sign-up process, enhanced parental controls that ensure a safe experience for all ages, and delightful content discovery tools for Star+ viewers in the region.

Putting it All Together — Designing Enhanced Features for Star+

Finding and Discovering Content

Adding live sports to the general entertainment content lineup posed an opportunity to explore how we can best promote discoverability of content, while also making it useful to the user.

For example, take a sporting event that consists of several individual matches, such as the US Open, Vuelta de España, or the NBA finals. How do we show, in a single element on a page, what the event is, where it is, what’s currently live, what’s upcoming, what matches belong together? Rather than reusing a movie or TV series landing page and populating it with live sports content, we had to rethink what a visual treatment for such an event should be.

In order to do this, we introduced a new design component that could promote both the overarching event and the matches themselves in a single eye-catching, impactful container. With the launch of this component, customers browsing Star+ see a window into an event’s hub and key information about the event, such as the location and dates, and can also immediately get into featured Live matches or add upcoming matches to their Watchlist.

As much as Star+ was built on the learnings from Disney+, the reverse is also true as part of our ongoing and iterative process to continuously evolve our products and platforms and deliver the best experiences possible. This design element first introduced within Star+ was recently brought into the Disney+ customer interface as part of a UI refresh on Disney+ Day, November 12, 2021. Additionally, new immersive visuals across Disney+ content brand pages, with iconic and eye-catching designs that best represent our brands and the power of their storytelling, were also derived from elements first introduced with Star+. As we innovate and iterate on one platform, it excels our others.

Search

A streaming service doesn’t work if viewers can’t find the content they want. Because discoverability is primary, we revamped our existing search capabilities from Disney+ by expanding our search UI to accommodate the unique, wide variety of content available in Star+. We made it easier for users to find exactly what they are looking for at the right time.

Looking for the match that’s currently live? It’s right up front with a small badge that indicates “live” status. Looking instead for a general entertainment show about sports? It’s there too, easily discoverable with the addition of separate tabs for “Movies and Series” and “Sports”. Were you looking for a sports match that was live, that’s now available for replay? Thanks to the dynamic nature of our new badging capabilities, we can now update that badge to read “replay” to keep our users in the know about the status of their favorite content.

Parental Controls

Star+ contains general entertainment content with higher maturity ratings than most Disney+ titles, as well as unrated sports content, so we had to adapt our existing Disney+ parental controls model to ensure an optimal experience for all viewers.

Parental controls allow content to be accessible to certain profiles based on rating. Applying user research, we developed both a mature rating system and as well as a toggle UI element that allows users to allow or block unrated content from appearing in the app for a specific profile. This is done on a profile level rather than an account level basis, so that subscribers can set up multiple profiles with different maturity ratings.

Sign Up Process

We wanted the Star+ sign-up process to be as simple as possible for both brand new users as well as existing Disney+ subscribers, especially for a user who wants to watch a live soccer game that starts in five minutes.

So we created Combo+, which is an attractively priced and popular bundle offering in the region that includes both Star+ and Disney+. Additionally, we built our sign-up flow on a single identity system, so that if a user has Disney+ and uses that same email in our sign-up flow, we recognize them as a current user and take them straight to the Combo+ billing screen. This single identity system also means that the email and password for both Star+ and Disney+ is the same- no need to remember multiple email and password combinations.

Live Sports Streaming Experience

Building a streaming service platform is one thing, but populating it with content is another. Although Disney Streaming was no stranger to live sports content (ESPN+ has supported live content for over three years), supporting the sheer volume of content on Star+ required us to get creative. Star+ supports tens of thousands of matches per year, with many of these matches happening at the same time, often in different countries and time zones.

We also needed to control for latency, which, for example, would be the time it takes for a soccer ball kicked in real life to make it to a viewer watching the live stream on their screen. If the screen is lagging several seconds or even minutes behind the actual game, social media could easily spoil the results. No one wants to hear neighbors cheering in order to find out who wins! Servers running our internally-developed stream encoding and packaging software were deployed in Sao Paulo, Brazil as well as in the United States in order to meet the demands of game volume, support regionally-produced programming, and minimize latency. This allowed for full redundancy while maintaining a high quality of experience for our viewers. Since so many of our live sports games originate in the LATAM region, having infrastructure physically on the ground in the region was important.

Lastly, we had to ensure that the data that accompanies each live game was accurate, localized, and able to respond to time-sensitive changes. If the time of a game changes, or teams are swapped, we need to be able to display that information on the front-end experience within the app in a timely manner. We support most program titles, artwork, audio tracks, and subtitles in Latin American Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and English so that our subscribers in Latin America can experience content in their preferred language.

In Conclusion

Building a standalone general entertainment and sports streaming service in Latin America was no simple task. The collaborative nature of this project (remotely in a pandemic no less) created a diverse dynamic rich in unique experiences and stories, both on and off the screen. This endeavor was a partnership with teams throughout Latin America, Europe, Asia, and North America, and across disciplines from content programming to experience design. The challenges and solutions were as multifaceted as the content lineup itself. We proudly collaborated across continents, time zones, and business segments to create a truly first-in-class product. The scalable approach we took to building Star+ strengthens Disney Streaming’s products and provides customer delight throughout the world, whether users want to be yelling “goal!” or wondering whodunnit in the latest true crime series.