On-demand BFI Player relaunches with curation focus

The new BFI Player has been developed by consultancy Ostmodern, which has also worked on on-demand player projects for ITV and Channel 4.

Ostmodern says it has been working with the BFI team on “long-term platform and product strategy” since the launch of the original BFI Player in 2013.

The platform redesign follows a consultation with 1000 BFI Player users and, says Ostmodern, takes in every aspect of the product and user journey – “from technical architecture and operational procedure to curatorial workflow and content discovery”.

Ostmodern UX director Tom Williams says: “We’ve put UX and curation at the heart of the project… This enables [the BFI team] to curate groups and collections that dovetail with genres, interests, special events, seasons and festivals throughout the year.”

He adds that the new BFI Player design allows for free archive content and premium paid-for content to be displayed together. Curated playlists will “really create meaningful links between films”, says Williams – “That’s when you start to see real value in old content”.

The new BFI Player has been designed as a responsive site and will display “beautiful, cinematic’ images at the highest resolution a user’s screen allows. Williams says: “People are coming to the site because of the content and we didn’t want the UI to get in the way of that.”

The BFI Player is built using Ostmodern’s Skylark framework while the consultancy also worked with video-hosting platform Ooyala.

It is relaunching with the Sci-Fi: Days of Fear and Wonder season and features a total of 1400 films within its service.