Challenge

Ever since green lighting its first original series, AMC Networks has bet that quality television will win out over formulaic mass appeal. As the home of Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead and (my favorite) Killing Eve, AMCN has proved that content is king. Yet, in the thick of the streaming wars, distribution is queen. Unlike Netflix or Amazon, AMCN is not a tech company. Resources are limited. I oversaw all web products for our five networks with only five developers. I inherited a fragile, bloated system that was challenging to update and regularly resulted in unexpected changes across our platforms.

Product

We desperately needed a way to gain internal efficiencies to deliver user value faster and catch up to the industry. What began as an effort to rebrand a single network evolved into a modular system that brought unified logic to our 35+ applications. A suite of basic components could be combined to retain core functionality, establish consistent UX patterns, build complex flows and allow branding flexibility across networks and platforms. Plus, it provided a green field to rethink and test into refined UX.

Results

We launched 6 digital TVE products in 6 months, retiring 8 legacy stacks in favor of a flexible, performant system that reduced load time by 60%, scaled to our mobile and OTT platforms and served as the foundation for AMCN’s next flagship product, AMC+. Without bugs, crashes or issues, it was called the “quietest launch at AMC in decades” and—mind you—all done while the backend was built in parallel path and a pandemic raged on.