Discovery+ Channels

Warner Bros Discovery (formerly Discovery) owns the rights to some of the best content, some of which is so binge worthy we saw viewers stream non-stop all day. Viewers also love to have TV going while they do other tasks around the house, and non-serialized TV shows are a perfect candidate for this type of behavior as they can tune in & out as they need.

Myself and a few others in the org were passionate about bringing the idea of 24/7 stations to life. We constantly discussed how we could make something like this happen, what would need to be true in order for it to be successful?

I jumped on the idea when an internal hackathon came around. The following are few of the explorations used to hack together a proof of concept.

We didn't win the hackathon, but we planted a seed.

A few months later I was asked to support the very same hackathon idea. The difference now is we had a real team, Join in progress was the term coined as users could jump right in.

We determined in order for channels to be successful we needed to ensure they had visibility outside of its dedicated page. We had to be able to integrate channels in all areas where content lived, including the home page, inline hero, within search, and watchlist.

While it may have started out as only Discovery+ content, the concept proved itself and in December of 2023, Warner Bros Discovery launched FAST channels. Today these channels are distributed across many services including the Roku Channel, Amazon's Prime Video, Tubi, and others.