Spanning both free to air and paid content, UKTV reaches over 42 million viewers per month across its 10 channels, representing around 9% of the commercial TV market in the UK. UKTV Play is the broadcaster’s on-demand suite of products featuring a diverse portfolio of content from four of its channels - Dave, Drama, Yesterday and Really.

While UKTV Play Initially launched on other platforms, the digital team were impressed by Amazon Fire TV’s technical specifications, competitive pricing and the opportunity it provided to expand their audience share, so knew it was a platform they needed to be on and set about creating a Fire TV App.

UKTV’s Head of Digital Products, Oliver Davies and Senior Front End Developer Owen Evans, shared with us the development strategies and choices they followed when implementing UKTV Play for Fire TV, what tools they used during UI and UX design, development, testing of the app, and how Amazon Appstore and Services enabled them during app development and publishing process. Here’s what they shared with us:

The business benefits of publishing to the Amazon Appstore

How Amazon's free web testing tool allowed the team to review updates quickly and efficiently

The challenges of delivering a 10ft experience, while remaining consistent to the UKTV Play brand

The various roles AWS plays in powering the UKTV Play app

Content discoverability and how Amazon's technology will help improve that experience

Build a Fire TV app

If you’ve never released an app or game for Fire TV, head over to Getting Started Developing Apps (Amazon Fire TV) for a quick intro. You’ll learn about development options (for example, native versus web apps), device and media specifications, and APIs that are available to you. You can also drag and drop your Android APK into our app testing tool to see if your app is already compatible for Fire TV with no additional coding required.