Kayo Sports: Reimagining the Mobile Streaming Experience for Millions of Australians

Since Kayo’s launch in 2018, streaming platforms have evolved significantly. Kayo identified the need for a new app experience which delivered on user expectations of a premium product, and elevated the way fans connect with and experience the sports they love. Users have unique expectations when streaming on mobile devices: whether watching on the go, as a second screen, catching up on key plays, or looking for snackable entertainment mid-week. The challenge was to engage fans in new ways through platform-specific design that leaned into mobile streaming’s unique advantages rather than simply recreating the TV experience on a smaller screen.

The project started with a collaborative Customer Experience (CX) Vision discovery to re-engineer the architecture around mobile-native interaction and user-centric discovery. The new apps embrace native platform features, including vertical video for a fresh way to watch the action, scrollable highlights feeds, and dynamic, bite-sized catch-up stories. Smarter navigation removes friction when searching for content and planning what to watch, while enhanced personalisation prioritises favourites and suggests relevant recommendations.A scalable cross-platform, multi-brand design system was created, with accessible components designed to handle complex scenarios and metadata. This enables seamless experiences across devices, and expansion across Foxtel’s other brands.

The project delivered immediate commercial success and operational value for the business. Prioritising mobile-native features drove a significant increase in viewing hours across iOS and Android. Kayo saw a surge in midweek viewing, with fans visiting the app more often on traditionally quieter days to engage with snackable highlights content. The cross-platform design system streamlined internal processes for both design and development, enabling rapid iteration and delivery. New workflows for creating broadcast assets delivered a modernised look and feel at scale, spotlighting Kayo’s vast content library with richer imagery that celebrated each event’s unique identity.

‘Stories’ and ‘Moments’ introduced vertical video, enabled by AI-powered content production and smart ball-tracking technology. Stories are must-watch plays in a familiar social-style format. Users can quickly identify when there’s fresh content available and tap through sports they follow. Moments provide a longer form of entertainment, packaging the best clips from live sport and midweek talk shows, giving users a reason to keep coming back to the app each day to scroll and discover something new. Enhanced personalisation was implemented throughout the app, reducing friction when searching and browsing, and presenting smarter recommendations on every page. The fixtures page underwent significant improvements, with the goal of transforming an underutilised feature into a dynamic planning tool that keeps users in-app and leverages Kayo's unique competitive advantage: browsing fixtures across 50+ sports and clicking directly into streaming that content.Improved content tiles dynamically display complex metadata and adapt to the progress states of each game, with each requiring different design rules, multiplied across every sport with their own unique scenarios.Bespoke broadcast assets were developed, informed by deep user research and testing, and powered by a vast content library to enable automated production at scale.