A private-label OTT app product to give independent streamers an easy "create your own Netflix" experience
As founding Creative Director at our software consultancy, oos, I collaborated closely with engineering and business leads to design Viewcastle from the ground up and bring the product to market. Viewcastle’s early traction led to the acquisition of oos by BoxCast. I played a lead role in rebranding the platform as BoxCast OTT and integrating it into the company's broader live streaming ecosystem. Today, BoxCast OTT powers apps for a wide range of organizations—from sports leagues to school districts to houses of worship—enabling anyone to launch branded streaming experiences and monetize their content across web, iOS, Android, tvOS, and Roku platforms.
I designed the logo and identity for Viewcastle and collaborated with our product team from early ideation. We loved the term "castle" for how it connotes a sense of ownership and pride, and for the wordplay around the concept of broadcasting. The unique brand name fit perfectly with the concept of OTT, being all about giving your viewers access to your content on your own platform—Viewcastle!
The logo mark implies a V and a C while playing with concepts of light projection, multimedia streaming, and of course, a Play button tilted at an angle.
In designing Viewcastle, I drew upon our team's past work building bespoke OTT apps for large media publishers, as the idea of Viewcastle is to enable smaller organizations to launch out-of-box apps that look and feel bespoke. The key design challenge was that a single standard experience needed to have broad application, using established OTT UX patterns (such as scrolling media rows, etc.) and accounting for a wide range of content types and quality of assets—while at the same time having a high-end feel that distinguishes Viewcastle from similar products on the market. Technical complexities around monetization and live streaming presented additional challenges in how content gets displayed to viewers.
The solution was to design for the lowest-common-denominator and allow optional layers of customization. For instance, the design accounts for media with no assets beyond a 16x9 thumbnail—even if it's just a still from the video. But for publishers with additional assets such as a full-width cover to go with a media item, they can slot these in for a more immersive and custom-feel viewer experience.
I built high-fidelity responsive prototypes of the viewer experience for web, mobile, and TV. Variable modes in Figma were especially useful in simulating different white-label brand configurations and toggling between them. An organized library of UI components and variables enabled pixel-perfect implementation by engineers using React and React Native. The scalable design system also allowed for Apple TV designs to be easily modified for development in BrightScript, Roku's proprietary scripting language.
In approaching design for the admin dashboard web app, I collaborated with engineers to style the main UI directly using Tailwind CSS. Certain custom components and flows (such as verifying/connecting a domain) were prototyped in Figma with variables corresponding to the Tailwind classes. This lightweight approach allowed our team to ship features quickly based on user interviews and continuous discovery efforts.
Launching Viewcastle as a small team afforded me the opportunity to meet one-on-one with 75+ customers and prospects over the course of a year, offering product demos and answering usability and technical questions. These initial onboarding and sales calls evolved into user interviews. My direct interactions with so many early users yielded valuable insights that I brought to our product team, enabling continuous discovery efforts to begin even before user interviews were formally in place.
