Newsletter
Hulu this week announced a bunch of new features will be rolling out to the company’s Android (and iOS) app starting next week. While the new features do not add anything majorly new to the Hulu experience, they are all designed to speed up how users engage with the app, as well as offering a more personalized experience overall. In fact, these features have been designed with on-the-go usage in mind, and as Hulu puts it, “just in time for summer.”
In terms of speeding up the mobile process, Hulu is introducing a new “lightning bolt icon” which will now show up on the navigation bar. This effectively acts as a quick shortcut to the live TV feature and will immediately return the viewer to the last channel the user was watching. If this is not the channel the viewer wants to see, then the recently announced new live TV guide will offer a quick view of what else is on, as well as the option to flip between the channels on mobile more easily and quickly. Speaking of which, to facilitate the new guide on mobile Hulu has also announced the app will now support a portrait mode that lets the user continue watching the content playing at the time, as well as being able to scroll through what else is on. As to be expected, this mode can be initiated (or deactivated) by adjusting the orientation of the phone.
On the personalized level, Hulu is now looking to make sure its recommendations are in line with its users’ expectations. As a result the company is introducing “Stop Suggesting” and “Remove.” Both of which are designed to ensure suggested content is not clouded with content the user is less interested in. For example, Stop Suggesting will blatantly tell Hulu this is not the sort of content a user wants to see suggested, while Remove will remove already-watched content from the account history, and by association disconnect it from Hulu’s search recommendations in future. Padding out the new features is better Chromecast support and a new ‘preview’ view which lets users see where exactly a ‘resume watching’ video is at before hitting resume.
