RTL+ tvOS Relaunch

RTL+ is Germany's largest streaming service. In late 2024 the Apple TV app — consistently top 10 in the App Store with a 4.6-star rating across 200,000+ reviews — needed a complete rebuild on a new technical foundation. I was the lead product designer on the end-to-end redesign, responsible for UI, UX, developer handoff, and tvOS-specific interaction design.

The hard constraint with tvOS is the remote. You're designing for a 10-foot viewing distance with a single directional input device — no hover states, no touch, no cursor precision. Focus management has to be engineered into every screen state, and content hierarchy has to work without any of the affordances you'd use on mobile. That's what made this non-trivial.

The decisions I made: a content-forward layout that puts show artwork and hero imagery at full bleed to drive discoverability, a navigation model optimized for remote traversal rather than adapted from the iOS version, and a design system built specifically for large-screen constraints — contrast ratios, type scale, and motion tuned for distance viewing.

We migrated 220,000 users to the new version without a rating drop. Post-launch usability testing returned a System Usability Scale score above 70 — a meaningful improvement over the previous version. The app maintained its 4.6-star rating through the transition.