Background
Toonbox is an animation studio famous worldwide for such animated series as "Mr. Freeman", "Kit^n^Kate", "Cut the rope", etc. They asked us for help in creating a mobile app "Kit^n^Kate", which allows users to watch and download any season or episode of the animated series.
01
Design and development of the multilingual mobile app “Kit’n’Kate”
02
Design and development of the admin panel for adding files.
Solution
01
TA Analysis
We have divided the TA of 'Kit^n^Kate' into 3 sectors: parents, children and studios interested in development of a similar mobile app.
PARENTS
Parents are those users for whom the convenience and simplicity of an app is important as well as the protection of a child from undesired content and their budget from accidental in-app purchases. It is also important that a child can easily perform the necessary actions in an app and watch cartoons without distracting parents.
What benefits does our app offer?
Firstly
Opportunity to watch certain studio’s cartoon or even certain animated series, which allows you to pay special attention to the interests of your TA. In MVP versions of the app we suggest to focus on one cartoon expanding the studio content over time.
Secondly
Children can’t switch to undesirable content, whether ads or videos an app offers, what is really important for parents. For example, the popular YouTube Kids app allows children to switch to negative or inappropriate for their age content. Own studio apps prevent this from happening because they precisely monitor and manage their content.
Thirdly
Thirdly, some parents travel a lot and change their work locations. It
is important for them to be able to download series and have offline
access. A significant factor for them is to have an app in the target
language, regardless of current location.
"Kit^n^Kate" is a multilingual app that supports 11 languages. Once a
language is selected, the user gets content in the target language, as
well as localization of the whole app.
Fourthly
Parents don’t want to be disturbed once again, for example, for switching episodes. In this case we have foreseen autoplay of the next episode. The interface is simple so that children can easily choose any episode themselves.
What if a child has downloaded episodes without parents knowing and spent a lot of mobile data traffic? Parental control can prevent such situations. During the download process the user is asked to solve a math problem, which is easy for adults, but will be a barrier for children.
CHILDREN
YouTube is one of the first platforms in the world that sets trends which we also try to follow. We have also made a handy player with minimum functions (play, pause, rewind), and autoplay of the next episode, if it’s available. So thanks to this simple, clear and bright interface, children will find the app convenient and interesting and it won’t take much time to figure out how it works.
ANIMATION STUDIOS
A mobile app is a powerful tool for increasing customer loyalty. Your
own studio app will provide constant interaction with the users and you
will take full advantage of personalization. Many market leaders such as
YouTube, ivi, TVzavr and various TV channels have their own apps, so it
is a great way of competing with other studios. It’s also an opportunity
to improve a market status as well as to attract new users.
Another important feature is your own content management system, which
allows studios to independently manage both content and multiple
languages. We let you do it with the help of an easy-to-use admin panel,
where studio members can easily add both new episodes and localization.
Using your own content management system, you can avoid undesired
content because uncontrolled systems can use aggregators that absorb
content from different resources.
02
Competitor analysis
In the Toonbox case we analyzed both Russian and American applications, the main task of which is to watch movies and cartoons. Namely the following applications: Фиксики (Fixiki), TVzavr, Мульт (Mult), Мультфильмы (Multfilmi), Ivi, Диафильмы (Diafilmi), Врунгель (Vrungel), Смешарики (Smeshariki), Мультики (Multiki), Пузыри (Puziri), Love is, Pokemon TV, Rutube Kidz, Youtube Kids, Мульти (Multi), Кукутики (Kukutiki). Then we analyzed all the functionality of these apps, focusing on the features that are key for the client.
Convenient video player, the opportunity to download certain episodes or the whole season quickly and watch them offline are particularly valuable for the user. If to speak about the client it’s a subscription monetization. So we decided to highlight the implementation of these features in competitive analysis. We excluded registration from the app, so as the main TA of the app are children and their parents. The sooner they start watching, the better.
We have also chosen the horizontal orientation, because we adapted the application to tablets. Then a very important step was to create a video player. Many apps offer such video player features as preloading and watching even in case of loss of connection and loss of connection message. We added the message, also provided autoplay of the next episode, if it is available, rewind, key lock.
Subscription in competitors’ apps is implemented in different ways: it
can be an annual, monthly, weekly subscription, or a purchase of certain
episodes or seasons. Some subscriptions include a trial version. We’ve
chosen an annual subscription, so as this model of monetization
increases the value for the user. At the same time, we provide a trial
version of 2 episodes of the 1st season. This can help the user to
understand if he/she likes the app and if he/she is interested in buying
a subscription for both watching and downloading content.
Many of the analyzed apps allow you to view a certain number of episodes
free of charge and download for a fee, which interests the user in
buying a subscription even more, because of the relevance of the offline
access for the TA.
Last but not least, very useful and widespread feature is restoring of
purchased subscription bound to the Apple ID. The user can access all
the functionality of the app on another phone or device.
03
Used hosting service
During the app development we faced a very serious and important problem
- we had to choose the hosting service to store the content based on
value of money criteria.
Many of them were not suitable because of high price, lack of
well-functioning streaming and sharing.
Webzilla is our choice
Pros:
low price
large storage space
extensibility (HDD, RAM, customization, etc.)
CDN (fast delivery of Internet content)
admin panel control with needed features
video conversion service
24/7 support via Skype.
Cons:
admin panel is essential for convenient uploading
so a back-end developer is absolutely necessary
manual conversion of series.