Twelve Hours Is a Bigger Ask Than Two

Choosing a film is a decision about tonight. Choosing a series is a decision about the next month, and viewers behave accordingly. They are slower, they read more, and they are far more likely to abandon the choice entirely if the interface makes them work. They also arrive in two completely different states. Either they have never seen the show, in which case they need to know what it is and how long it runs, or they are four episodes in, in which case everything except the next episode is noise. A listing that serves only the first of those is the most common mistake in catalogue design, because it treats every visit as a discovery problem when most visits are a resumption problem.

A show has a synopsis and so does every episode, and the second one does more work than most operators expect. It is what somebody reads when they are deciding whether to watch one more before bed, and it is what tells a returning viewer which episode they actually got to when the numbering is not enough. Each episode carries its own title, its own still, its own duration and its own description, which also means each one is a page a search engine can index rather than being invisible inside a show. That is a meaningful amount of traffic for a catalogue with any depth to it. How viewers find their way in is covered under content search, and the rows shows appear in under content lists.

A show browsed on a laptop, a phone and a television is the same show, but the way somebody moves through it is not remotely the same. A mouse can hover, a thumb cannot. A remote control has four directions and an OK button, which rules out most of what works on the web. Vodlix builds the listing separately for each rather than scaling one layout down and calling it responsive, while keeping the underlying structure identical, so a viewer who picked a season on a phone finds the same place on the television. The platform specific behaviour is described under TV apps and mobile apps.