Goodbye, Tweek iOS App
Today, we announce to take the Tweek App offline.
From day 1, Tweek has been about connecting people to video. Tweek was designed as a new entry door to future video consumption: One Personalised Video Discovery across hundreds of Apps + Websites to serve everybody with nothing less than the personally & contextually most relevant content.
Tweek aims to solve two major consumer problems we all know when leaning back on the couch in the evening to watch video:
What’s worth my time?
Where can I get it now?
We wanted to build a product as simple as TV (press 1 button and it works) and as intelligent as the web. Today, this vision is clear and crisp but it was not in October 2010 when we started.
Netflix was still a mail delivery (remember?) and streaming service in parallel at that time. European Broadcasters had first & little time shifting/ catchup offerings and media companies established VoD offerings which were mainly driven by marketing and without user experience or deep tech knowledge in mind.
The market and especially the consumer feedback towards Tweek was very positive and pushed us to work even harder. People mainly loved the groundbreaking design approach of our first design by Frank and also the idea of putting content at the center and annotating it with meta data, related friends interactions, community features and link to VoD services incl. price and quality comparison around it. Nonetheless, Tweek also faced three main shortcomings:
Deep linking
Deep linking was a big user experience shortcoming on mobile before major internet companies such as Facebook decided to fix it. Tweek was one of the first services, trying to bridge App silos and connect users into 3rd party App offering, directly. Depending on content rights, you could end up watching the content in Tweek (Youtube + arte), within an embedded web view (ARD, ZDF, Pro7Sat1 catchup) within the iTunes Store (iTunes content or App downloads) or within a 3rd party app (Netflix, Amazon Prime, Maxdome …) This let to a cluttered, non-unified user experience.
Business Case
The main business case of the Tweek App is lead generation. Mobile platforms were not ready for this in 2012/13. Tracking system were either not installed or ended within the AppStore. Web enabled landing pages of Video on Demand services were not mobile optimised. Many conversion killers remained.
Target group
We included live tv schedules to target users who grew up with linear television in addition to our core, millennial target group. We figured along the way that the feature set for those 2 groups has to be different and we constantly struggled to fullfill both needs in parallel. Today, we are sure to split the service by target group. You can not transfer users between those mental models of TV and video. TV will die with those who grew up with it and video is slowly but surely take over — eyeballs and eventually ad dollars.
Today, we announce to take down the current version. We haven’t updated the code since September 2013 and right now, we still see it as an adorable product but quality is not where it has to be. Our quality benchmark has always been stellar and Tweek App is not, anymore. Simply, performance of 20 months old code can not be where we want to see it. Even though bug rates have been low, maintenance costs are increasing and Tweek App needs more than a facelift — performance and concept wise.
We are very much looking forward to build the next version. While most us focus on our API product, right now, a small group works on the next generation Tweek. Prototypes are running, already. It will be very different from prior versions but the vision is still very much alive.
Thanks to all who were part of this ride so far ❤️
Team Tweek
